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Articles Conference Reviews |
K.6 Teachers’ Comments through Students’ EyesK.6 Teachers’ Comments through Students’ Eyes Chair: Kathleen Blake Yancey, Florida State University, Tallahassee Nancy Sommers, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, “Writing in the Margins: Why Students Find Some Comments Useful and Ignore Others” Sommers begins by stating that reading and responding to student drafts is time-consuming, and that we often spend more time with our students’ drafts then with our students. Over the years she has gotten the sense that responding to student drafts is unsatisfying sometimes for both students and teachers. What if students don’t really understand the comments that we spend so much of our time on? Sommers reports on interviews with students at Bunker Hill Community College, MA. She shows a video of students talking about how they react to teachers’ comments. Several students describe feelings of embarrassment and discouragement. “Fixing is not learning” said one student. Students talked about the difficulty they have in interpreting teachers’ handwriting. Students talked about how much they appreciate when teachers give a balance of “sweet and sour,” as one student put it: a good mix of praise and constructive criticism. Another student said “begin conversations rather than end them.” “Make them think” said another. Sommers asks, “do students read teachers’ written comments?” She answers that they do, unless they literally cannot read the penmanship. She talks about the affective dimension of how students react and feel about how teachers can either encourage or discourage them in their writing performances. Sommers believes the either/or of less is more, direct or indirect are less important than the explicit rationales we give students as to why we comment the way we do. She argues that students often do not apply all the comments we give them because they simply don’t know how to apply all of them. Perhaps we need to provide less commentary, moving more toward higher-order and minimal marking practices. She argues that especially developmental and ESL students are overwhelmed with too many comments. She then asks, "do students understand teachers’ comments?" Sommers highlights the above student's admonishment to think of commenting as beginning “conversations rather than ending them.” She also referred to a student who advised that we “give suggestions, not commands.” She urges “comments with a background,” or invoking the shared places students and the class have been and the things they’ve already been talking about. She concludes by stressing that less is often more because students cannot absorb 18 mini-lessons within a single paper. Chris Anson, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, “Giving Voice: Reflections on Oral Response to Student Writing” Anson starts by arguing how the first 20 years on research on teacher response sliced and diced student writing, but very few studies actually consulted with students on what they thought or how they felt about this research. He moves on to describe how Screen Capture (SC) is a kind of audio and textual representation of everything a person does on the computer, almost like a little YouTube video. Anson goes on to play a sample of a teacher giving a student paper audio-recorded comments. Anson and colleagues are interested in how students and teachers react to this type of feedback and response, the relationship between teacher intention and student perception (including student affective perceptions). He gives some data involving how the average number of words for written commentary is 109 versus 745 for oral commentary! But he asks the quality versus quantity question: is one mode “better” than the other? His research team asked students how helpful the comments were. Students found the screen comments 70-80% effective in most aspects of improving their writing, while 75% of students said they preferred the screen audio comments to traditional feedback. On the affective level, students found the SC comments were statistically much stronger along several affective dimensions—supportive, caring, considerate, personal, friendly, and encouraging. And negative affect items were statistically less likely to occur. Students spent about the same amount of time reading or listening to the comments. But, Anson warns that the study is a little more complicated than these promising figures appear to indicate. Anson shows a video of a student’s reactions that seem very typical: the student says that the feedback is very opinionated. He commented on how the teacher feels he is not expanding on his ideas in relation to the page limit, yet how he is trying to stick to the page limit. The student commented honestly about how the teacher felt he was very smart but just not representing that in his writing. Anson ends with a student who contrasted SC to the one-to-one conference in which she could really interact with the teacher, and how she felt frustrated that she did not get as much quality feedback with SC as she could during a face-to-face conference with the teacher. |