Helping First-Year Students Become Confident Writers at Florida SouthWestern State College

 My name is Heather Olson. The primary course that I teach is an academic success course that’s required for all incoming freshmen. I would say the biggest challenge my students face is lack of confidence in their writing. Packback immediately changed that. And that was the feedback I’ve gotten every single semester, that Pakback helps them to feel like they’re good writers. It helps them to feel like they’re writing on a college level because of the support it offers.

I was involved in our first pilot of Pacback and then that first semester my students had to write a final essay about what they found most impactful in the course. And I would say three quarters of them wrote about Pacback and they wrote how it made them a better writer, how it helped them to support their ideas more proficiently, and how it helped them to write better transitions, how it really boosted their confidence because they got the support and grammar mechanics.

I also noticed that progressively in their essay assignments, their grading had gotten progressively better throughout the semester. So even when they weren’t writing in Packback, those skills were transferring over to their other assignments. In terms of ed tech tools that I’ve used, it’s the one that I’ve had the least emails asking questions about how to use and the least complaints about. It’s intuitive for students when they go into how to use it.

I haven’t had to really give a lot of introduction for Pacback. I’m like here, we’re using Packback. It’s in the LS. GO! The motivation factor of Packback gets them engaged so that it’s actually a much lighter lift for me because I don’t have to keep going …did you do it? Did you do it? The quality of my students’ writing has increased so much that it has lightened my grading load and the lack of having to do all the red line edits.

It’s a much lighter lift. I can really engage in students’ content and I think that helps to build a stronger relationship between the teacher and the students so that they want to do the work because they’re not worried about getting criticized for it. In terms of academic honesty, I have not had issues with plagiarism in Packback because students are seeing their plagiarism reports, so they’re able to see that on the backend and they’re able to make any adjustments before I see it.

Packback really helps to engage them in the kind of the relevancy of being able to follow what they’re curious about. And that just changes the cognitive load in such a way that there just isn’t a need for them to cheat. Cheating is a resource for students, and that’s a resource they don’t need if they’re doing something that they enjoy. It makes me enjoy grading.

In Packback, writing becomes something that’s about their engagement with the process, the way that the support and the curiosity points work, it really puts that ownership back on the students to think about their ideas, to think about, what they’re writing about and not just how they’re writing.

Packback Inc. Gave them the confidence and the tools to do that!