'Shit-Plus' 'AWK' 'Frag' 'Huh?' Part 1 of 2

An empirical look at a writing program's commenting practices. Fresno State students speak about their First Year Writing teachers' written comments. Presented at CCCC 2009, San Francisco.

Please email Jocelynstott@gmail.com for more information.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Teacher
• comments
• CCCC
• First
• Year
• Writing
• Students

[Briankuchta]

This would be true even for comments made by a teacher on a paper. Therefore, unless the students have clarified every comment with the teacher (which seems unlikely in terms of time), how can they be sure they have truly understood the teacher's intentions?

Second, what types of comments are these students talking about? Are they based in grammar, structure, or content? There is great disparity in the ability of a reader to understand written comments based on this differentiation.

[Briankuchta]

We have been studying the concept of written commentary on the part of the teacher and how these comments are often vague and/or misinterpreted by the student. So, I question how these students knew that they understood the teacher's comments. This also falls into the idea of whose concept of what is written is correct - the writer or the reader. As Barthes suggests in "The Rustle of Language", the reader and writer can have very different interpretations of the intention behind text.

[Briankuchta]

My name is Brian, and I am in the Language and Literacy program at City College in NYC.

First of all, I want to congratulate you on your excellent work in this video study.

After watching this video, several questions have come to mind:

First, in the section in which the students commented on the teacher's comments, many of the students stated that they usually understood the teacher's comments overall. How can they be sure?

[KenThoMen]

It was good to see some of the students in the video sympathizing with their professors whose comments were sometimes illegible or irrelevant, attributing these shortcomings to the volume of work that their teachers have to do. Gordon Harvey's "Repetitive Strain..." is directly applicable.

[StacePrints25]

One thing that threw me off, however, was the overall objective of the video. I know the focus is a broad study on teachers commenting styles and impact of the student, but the statistics used to support this sometimes seem to focus more on the impact of race and some psychological (color of ink used) issues when evaluations are made. Maybe this could be called out in the title of the presentations?

~Stace

[StacePrints25]

As someone who works as a digital (internet) advertiser, I truly appreciate the use of YouTube to convey the research. They demonstrate a student-centric teaching focus because not only is the research about how students "evaluate" teacher evaluations, but they are utilizing a medium that their students probably use on a daily basis. I think this group was successful at making this research accessible to both students and educators on many levels.

~Stace

[TSTaylor275]

I found this presentation to be a good response to the more rigid professors who offer more critiques than guidance on papers. It would be great if this was the start of a catalyst for change amongst professors to are prone to doing reviewing papers this way. I congratulate you guys for being innovative on bringing this issue to the forefront for college students.

[Graig315]

I thought that the video was well done, and it was insightful to hear from other grad students about their opinions on teacher comments. The idea of creating a video was ingenious. A paper or a tape recording could not recreate what was learned by watching and hearing other students talk about their experiences. The quality of the video along with efflux information demonstrates what I assume to be an enormous amount of time and effort exerted to produce.

[sweetmsd3]

As a former CWE writitng consultant, there has been debate on the "plagiarizing" by teachers. Dr. Gleason beleives that when a student really needs help, the teachers has to "prompt" not plagiarize. More like a spring board to help the student think more about their writing.

[DocMcBeth]

Michele: I'd be interested to hear more of your experiences about how race affects attention in the classroom.  Could these anecdotes inform your memorable learning experience essay?