Teacher Assessment, Response, and Grading to Student Writing
"Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers
Nancy Sommers does a great job this article laying out how complex and misunderstood the practice of commenting on student writing is, which is concerning considering just how much time teachers and Professors spend on doing it, claiming that it is likely how the largest portion of their time is spent.
There is no established way to provide feedback on student writing, and no accepted knowledge of what type of feedback is helpful. As somebody who has had experience providing feedback as an SI and grader for various English courses, I can relate to the uncertainty that this article paints. Because personally, I'm not sure if my approach is actually accomplishing anything or not. To comment on student writing, Sommers points out, is a natural extension of how professional writers and academics seek help from editors and peers. Furthermore, since student writers are new to the practice, they struggle to imagine writing for an audience, and the teacher thus serves as an "imagined audience" by providing their feedback. So theoretically, the practice makes sense. But is it practical?
Well, Sommers finds that there are clearly some drawbacks:
"Teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting." (149)
Essentially, when teachers provide comments on a student's writing, students stop thinking of themselves as writers with an idea they are trying to communicate and they start to view themselves as students who are trying to meet the desires of their teacher. In my opinion, this doesn't have to be entirely a bad thing, since what the teacher is looking for from student writing is, assumedly, that it learns to emulate existing scholarly styles of writing. However, there is a degree of agency removed from the student in this process, and often these comments are misunderstood as arbitrary rules that must be followed because the teacher demanded it, rather than shifting a student's perspective to consider what would be the best way to communicate an idea to an audience.
There are also issues in how teachers provide directions. For instance, when teachers ask students on a first draft to correct issues such as diction, grammar, and spelling, there is too much emphasis placed on simple line edits while taking attention away from the more significant parts of revision. Furthermore, students can feel confused by seemingly contradictory advice, such as asking students edit lines to be shorter and more concise, while asking the overall paragraph be developed more. Collectively, these problems frustrate students and transform their self-perception and approach to writing from a means of communication and expression to a series of (sometimes incomprehensible) checkboxes.
Revision is inherently a risky procedure, and is at its best when it allows a writer to better understand their writing and finds new ways to improve it. But often times, the negative comments of a teacher become the safe zones of revision for students, while the rest of the paper is left alone.
Learning about this issue was really interesting. It seems there's a real problem in the classroom for how students receive feedback on their writing. I like that Nancy Sommers doesn't suggest that the solution is to simply stop providing feedback, but rather, the quality of the comments needs to be significantly improved. Teachers need to understand their students educational needs, and how students typical respond to different types of comments, before carefully considering what needs to be said and what is the best way to say it. As somebody who wants to work in education, I will definitely be keeping these problems in mind while I think of what my own solutions could potentially be.
"Response and the Social Construction of Error" by Chris M. Anson
A common theme I've noticed when it comes to process pedagogy is that while overall the shift from product to process has been a positive one, completely avoiding discussion on the product itself is not a perfect solution. While heavy emphasis on errors in grammar and spelling are unnecessary, I think it would be a disservice to students to simply ignore it altogether. Furthermore, while focusing on the process of writing has seemingly been very helpful for students, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't value in seeing how the process culminates in a final product. In this article, Chris M. Anson outlines that the concept of an "error" in such a product, however, is more complicated than one might initially assume. Identifying an error, and alerting the student to said error, is a process of adhering to certain conventions that are ultimately constructed and not fully inflexible.
"Linguists have long argued that errors are socially constructed (albeit often tacitly) because the underlying rules that define error are themselves part of an organic and changing system... changes in acceptability are part of the natural evolution of languages and dialects" (6-7)
So when we notice errors, which we often do implicitly through internalized rules rather than algorithmically, we are noticing something that doesn't line up with how we are currently using language. There is no inherently "right" or "wrong" rules to have, but rather, we need rules for the sake of clear communication with one another, while accepting that these rules will ultimately change over time.
Another interesting thing to note is that when there are errors within a work, there is a social element as well. The ethos, or the credibility of a writer, is subconsciously questioned when a work contains errors. In my opinion, while this can be understandable since one might assume the more effort one puts into a work the less errors it'll have, this is also disheartening to those who learn English as a second language, because their errors will likely outnumber those of their peers who have better internalized the rules. Furthermore, this doesn't consider the fact that there are dialects of English that aren't typically considered "correct" for academic writing. Again while these rules make sense when the goal is clear communication, they are also (perhaps unintentionally) somewhat exclusionary.
The way to approach writing errors, Anson argues, is to research and employ what he coins "reflective practices":
"Teachers engaged in reflective practice are continuously applying the results of a previous experience to modified actions and the testing of new ideas. Reflection in action is the process by which teachers constantly transform and improve their current understandings and behaviors." (7)
This leads to treating each classroom and student uniquely, rather than having copy and paste corrections to common and basic errors. I really like the idea of "reflective practice" when it comes to teaching, and agree with Anson that more research should be done on it. Currently, according to him, many teachers don't engage in that way and it is to the detriment of their students. The onus isn't entirely on teachers either, it is often through the process of research that certain practices are popularized (process pedagogy is one great example of this). Thus by combining one's own reflections on their own pedagogy, as well as supporting and engaging with existing research, teachers have the best chance of having a positive impact on their students.
"A Grade-Less Writing Course" by Asao B. Inoue
I feel really conflicted about this article written by Asao B. Inoue. On one hand, I definitely agree with him that students should be given a greater "right to their own language," and that on some level it's unfair to penalize students for coming into a classroom with less mastery of the academic style of writing than their fellow peers. Each student might have to do a different amount of labor for their work to be considered "good," and this goodness is typically defined in a really narrow way that isn't particularly inclusive.
Then again, by focusing assessment purely on the labor and not the quality of either the process or the product of the writing, I feel we are doing a disservice to students. As egalitarian as we might aim to make the classroom by allowing different types of English into it, students will still face a workforce that has its own decorum and rules that must be followed. In any career, there is an expectation for the potential employee to adapt to its unique expectations. By mimicking this in classrooms, and teaching students the typically accepted diction and grammar, we are helping them be prepared to secure a job in the workforce.
Inoue does attempt to tackle this question in his section "How Do We Know How Well We Are Doing," where he discusses how grades will be distributed at the end on the basis of time and intensity spent on labor, as well as the difficulty of the labor performed. I think ultimately I agree with his core message that effort should be rewarded, since not every student comes from the same background with the same skill:
"Most importantly, all efforts and labor must be acceptable, as long as students continue to incorporate the practice of the course, improve and reflect meaningfully... and listen to colleagues." (81)
But I think ultimately we need to define what "improvement" looks like, and grades help assess and do that. Those grades don't necessarily need to be letter or point marks, but I think they need to in some way demonstrate to the student what they are doing correctly and what needs improvement. Even in the classroom painted by this author, for there to be improvement, there needs to be a "right" way to do things that students are attempting to approach, even if that "right" way is more inclusive in his classroom.
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