Teen Writing Skills Improve with Blogging

Pew survey shows that student bloggers write more and value the practice more than non-bloggers. The survey of 700 U.S. residents ages 12 to 17 confirms much of the research I performed in the study “Edublogging: Instruction for the Digital Age Learner”

Blogging appears to be helping teens become more productive writers. This is a promising finding that has important implications for schools. A survey recently conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project explored the links between the formal writing that teens do for school and the informal, electronic communication they exchange through email and text messaging.

According to the 2008 study, teens who communicate frequently with their friends, and those who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones, do not write more often for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens. However, teen bloggers write more frequently both online and offline.

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs. Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53 percent of non-bloggers say the same thing.

This information seems to confirm the results I found in my study on edublogging. Blogging allows a student to write more with more insight into the topic. The student will have deeper thoughts on the subject at hand and will be more motivated to write about the subject. This motivation for writing will assist the student in a variety of other subjects in school and may even lead to a better understanding of their own psyche.

The report notes that teens write for a variety of reasons such as part of a school assignment, to communicate with friends, to share their creations with others, or simply to document their thoughts. They are more motivated to write when they can select topics that are important to their lives and interests, and they report greater enjoyment of school writing when they have the chance to write creatively. Teens also report that writing in a blog for a local or worldwide audience motivates them to write clearly and more often.

The report also confirms my findings about the ambiguity in computer usage at home and at school. Educators seem perplexed when it comes to assigning blogging assignments because many students do not have computers at home. But computer ownership increases daily as prices go down and the need or want of these machines rises. Teens who use a computer at home for their non-school writing believe computers have a greater impact on the amount of writing they produce than on the overall quality of their writing.

Among teens who use computers in their non-school writing, four in 10 say computers help them do more writing, and a similar number believe they would write the same amount whether they used computers or not. Only three in 10 teens who write on computers for non-school purposes at least occasionally believe computers help them do better writing. Twice as many (63 percent) say computers make no difference in the quality of their writing.

Most students (82 percent) believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further--and more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78 percent) think it would help their writing if their teachers used computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class.