Completing the Scaffolding: Using Citelighter to Bolster Executive Function

I teach for a blended school where students have freedom to choose what they learn and when, which has many benefits both for students and teachers.  However, it does mean students have extra freedom to abandon work without immediate consequences (no zero in the grade book, for instance).  Many factors contribute to giving up, but I’ve often wondered how decreased executive function impacts that tendency as many of our students seem to struggle with management.   A lack of management in self and resources is crippling in any school environment, but especially  this kind.  Unfortunately, it’s easy to lament the absence of these “soft skills” and very difficult to create a plan to teach, scaffold and model them.

This week I sought for ways to bolster executive function and was struck by a study by Steven Graham which focused on the writing process (I’m an ELA teacher, so this is my jam).  He asked middle school students with learning disabilities who struggled with executive function to revise their writing through a particular system – the CDO (compare/diagnose/operate system created by Scardamalia and Bereiter in 1983).  The system was designed to support revision by walking students through a series of predetermined steps and options (like a choose your own adventure for revision).  The concern was that “[revising] processes may occur sporadically or not at all because the writer has difficulty directing cognitive resources to the appropriate element at the proper time,” and not due to a complete lack of resources (Graham, 1997, p. 223).

Graham’s use of CDO with students with learning disabilities yielded similar results to it’s mainstream use.  Students liked feeling more in control and local improvements to the writing increased, although globally not much changed in their writing.  From his work, Graham concludes that students will always, “benefit from external support aimed at helping them organize and manage the individual elements underlying the revising process” (1997, p. 232).  Once resource management is under control, teachers can then spend more time with students building their resource bank. Because management was no longer a barrier, the study inadvertently highlighted what tools the students were using (and not using) to revise. For example, of the possible choices for revision queues to follow using CDO, students most commonly relied on if the sentences “sounded okay,” but rarely chose the queue “this is not useful for my paper”  (Graham, 199, p. 232).

To apply the study beyond the revision and to the whole writing process, one would use a predetermined system to alleviate executive function pressures so students can focus more on the writing skills themselves.   One resource that can aid on this front is Citelighter.  It’s an online management system for planning and drafting writing.  Students customize their writing outlines based on a few specific options and then work through filling in those outlines.  One can also purchase additional features that would allow teachers to track, comment and grade directly through the online program.  This seems to be a great match for reducing the stress of executive function because there are clear steps to walk through and a specific set of choices to scaffold the planning and writing process.  Similarly to providing a CDO system for revision, this would give a clear process, no matter what the genre of writing.  By providing a process, my students would “benefit from external support aimed at helping them organize and manage” as Graham concluded (1997, p. 232).

The downside to Citelighter, in my context, is that because we rely heavily on our own online program to deliver instruction and feedback, adding another program on top of this might cause students some confusion.  This would negatively impact students who struggle with executive function because there would be more to manage.  Finding a way to meld Citelighter into our current system would be ideal, but with copyrights and intellectual property barriers, that would be very unlikely to happen, I think.  I see this program working best within a face-to-face environment, so perhaps there would be a way to incorporate it into our learning labs.  Classroom teachers would do well to seriously consider the use of this tool or even consider talking-to administration about their whole-school options.

Check out my brief walk through here:

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References

Graham, Steven.  (1997).  Executive Control in the Revising of Students with Learning and Writing Difficulties.  Journal of Educational Psychology.  Vol. 89 (No. 2),  223 – 234.  Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/docview/614359750/fulltextPDF/BD548FB910E34930PQ/3?accountid=12598

Bengtsson, Jonas. (2008) Scaffolding Incomplete. [Image file]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonasb/2751113526