Teaching English 101 this quarter has ignited many questions for me regarding what pedagogical approaches advance student writing, specifically in the realm of feedback and revision. My motivation to understand best practices in regards to how to give effective feedback and how to assign and evaluate revision, is rooted both in wanting to provide students with an opportunity to measure growth in their writing and in my specific professional development goals.
While I have provided some feedback to student writing via Canvas (most substantially for Project 1: the literacy narrative) and students have engaged in peer review, students this quarter were not required to revise their literacy narrative or any other piece of writing and incorporate feedback. Reflecting on how my students feel about themselves as writers and not knowing much other than general statements at the beginning of class about how they don’t consider themselves good writers, I have a strong desire to support a process where they can reflect on their goals and their growth as writers. Additionally, I am aware of my own limited experience in providing feedback and knowing the theories or data behind what effective feedback is and how to implement providing such feedback.
The assumptions I held before teaching English 101 in terms of what teaching writing would entail included common assumptions around needing to teach things like sentence and paragraph structure. Over the course of reading various articles this quarter, from pieces in “Bad Ideas About Writing” to other articles I came across for our annotated bibliography posts, I have learned about larger questions such as how to support substantive vs. editorial revision, the actual effect of teacher comments, and the role of student reflection on the writing process. Some of these concepts are present in our English 101 curriculum and I would like to build on these practices further by incorporating revision into the curriculum. I am interested in learning more about effective feedback practices that yield substantial revision in a piece of student writing and integrating such practices into the curriculum.
A possible research process for this could be: 1) Designing a self-assessment for students that they take both at the beginning and end of the quarter, and 2) Designing at least one assignment with a rubric related to revision and provide feedback in the form of teacher comments, that is implemented over the course of the quarter. In “Revision and Reflection: A Study of (Dis)Connections between Writing Knowledge and Writing Practice,” the authors provide a rubric of levels of revision, differentiating between substantive, moderate and editorial revision. A point of comparison for this research could be what type of feedback generates a higher percentage of students conducting substantive revisions – such as directive and high-order feedback vs perhaps more dialogic feedback (I need to learn more about models of written feedback and variables present within this). Another point of comparison could be student self-assessments from the beginning and end of the quarter regarding confidence and self-identified ability in tackling high-order revision. These points of comparison could potentially be made over two assignments in the same quarter or one assignment implemented over two quarters.
A positive outcome would be that the majority of students are able to achieve moderate or substantive revision and would report on increased confidence in their writing abilities. A negative outcome would be the majority of students achieving editorial level revision and not reporting an increase in awareness or confidence in revision tactics. There are many factors at play in this proposal – student self-evaluation, written feedback from the teacher, and explicit class time dedicated to the topic of revision as it relates to an assignment and the related rubric. In many ways, these elements are working in concert together to support revision skills in students.
Sources:
Lindenman, Heather, Martin Camper, Lindsay Dunne Jacoby, and Jessica Enoch. “Revision and Reflection: A Study of (Dis)Connections between Writing Knowledge and Writing Practice.” College Composition and Communication 69.4 (2018): 581-611. Print.
Adler-Kassner, Linda, and Elizabeth A. Wardle, eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Utah State UP, 2015.
Flower, Linda, et al. “Detection, Diagnosis, and the Strategies of Revision.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 37, no. 1, 1986, pp. 16–55.
Harris, Joseph. “Revision as Critical Practice.” College English, vol. 65, no. 6, July 2003, pp. 577–92.
Dohrer, Gary. “Do Teachers’ Comments on Students’ Papers Help?” College Teaching, vol. 39, no. 2, 1991, pp. 48–54.
Irvin, L. Lennie. “A Grounded Theory of Rhetorical Reflection in Freshman Composition.” Dissert., Texas Tech U, 2010.
Downs, Douglas. “Revision Is Central to Developing Writing.” Adler-Kassner and Wardle, pp. 66–67.
I like this a lot. You’ve found your way to real central scholarship in the field, and the question you’re asking is a really important one for developing the curriculum further. It’s a big project to design some revision-focused projects into the schedule (which probably means minimizing some other stuff), as well as finding a way to test how effective things are.
I might suggest simplifying a bit–rather than having experimental revision assignments at multiple points in the curriculum, what if you just had one, and then an extension focused on revision. It might provide interesting info to see who picks it. Another idea (and I’m not sure this is a good one), what if you did a comparison study, splitting the class in half and giving one half a certain kind of feedback, and the other half a different kind? You could even follow this format throughout the quarter, one experimental group getting a specialized form of feedback, one control group getting some kind of standardized form of feedback. You could switch half way through. Might not be the kind of direction you want to go, but it could be a cool way to make this more experimental.