Showing posts with label HStoCollege. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HStoCollege. Show all posts
Friday, September 23, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Notes on Rehearsing New Roles (Carroll)
Our study students did not necessarily learn to write “better,” but they did learn to write differently—to produce new, more complicated texts, addressing challenging topics with greater depth and complexity. (xii)
But what do we actually know about how the writing of students develops over the course of several years of college? This longitudinal study attempts to answer this question for a group of 20 students at a midsize independent university by following their development as writers over four years (xi)
…examining literacy in college from the students’ perspective (xiv)
My analysis of the data collected in this study supports a limited but still useful role for first-year composition, demonstrates how students do learn to write differently across the curriculum in ways that may or may not be recognized by faculty, and examines the teaching and learning practices that promote or constrain student development. (xiv)
In order to more fully understand the complex literacy tasks required in college, we asked our 20 students to collect portfolios of their writing across a variety of disciplines, to complete regular self-assessments, and to participate in a series of focus groups and interviews about their academic work. (5)
Walvoord and McCarthy (1990) demonstrate the difficulties students encounter in four disciplinary courses in business, history, human sexuality, and biology, and show how each course presents unique problems in constructing the audience and the self, stating a position, using discipline-based methods of support, and organizing and managing complexity.
Walvoord and McCarthy, L (1990). Thinking and writing in college: A naturalistic study of students in four disciplines. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
For students, each semester in college involves various types of transitions, and each course, each professor, each task represents a more or less different ecological environment… The variety of these expectations is often underestimated by faculty who again fantasize writing as a stable skill that can be applied in different circumstances rather than as a complex set of abilities developing unevenly through many periods of transition requiring a variety of different roles. (23-24)
My analysis challenges the myth that writing is a stable, unitary skill that can be learned once and then simply applied in new circumstances. It shows that the problems students face in writing in college are not primarily grammatical. Instead, our study students demonstrate that even writers who enter college proficient in constructing simple reports or arguments will struggle with tasks that require more complex analysis and methods of presentation. However, it is precisely in struggling with these challenging tasks that they develop new skills. (27)
Study Design
This study seeks to fill the gap between the perception that students “can’t write” and the reality that the thousands of students who earn undergraduate degrees each year are apparently able to “write” well enough to satisfy the requirements of their various academic programs. (26)
Origin/Background of Study: In 1994, the General Education Committee at Seaver College set about to assess student learning in the general education core curriculum. A randomly selected sample of 46 incoming first-year students were identified and selected to include in the study. Of the initial cohort, 30 students provided substantial data and 20 completed the four-year longitudinal study. (32)
Methodology: Qualitative (interviews, interviewer notes, artifact collection, focus groups)
Method (32-34):
Representation: If our study students are representative at all, they are the students on the “inside” of that boundary, though some come from families that have only recently and only narrowly crossed from the “margins” to the “mainstream” of class and culture… The literacy practices analyzed in this volume, then, are not simply a generic set of skills, practices indicative of the way advanced literacy in college must be or ought to be, but the specific practices of a specific group of students in a particular time and place. (39).
Findings
Our study challenges the myth that even students who by most traditional methods would be considered “prepared” for college “can’t write” and shows that the problems students face in academic writing are not primarily grammatical. It demonstrates that college writers who may be proficient in constructing simple reports or arguments will struggle with tasks that require more complex analysis and methods of presentation. However, it is in struggling with these tasks that they develop new skills. College faculty members can support novice writers in these periods of transition as students work out the strategies they need to tak on new roles as writers (118-119).
From our study, what can we conclude about the role of the ubiquitous first year composition course in developing profiency in writing presumed to be useful in college or the workplace?
…based on the experience of our study students, I would argue that …such a course serves as a useful, albeit limited, purpose as a transition from high school and other previous writing experiences to writing in the university. (119)
…first-year writing courses [should be viewed as] a point of transition, not a final destination or a detour to fix literacy problems before students begin their real journey (123).
Adding an Upper-Level Writing Requirement
In addition to a one semester first-year writing course, we have recommended, based on our longitudinal study, that Pepperdine, like many other universities, add an upper-level writing requirement to focus on writing in a student’s major discipline…We found that the research and writing courses that some of our study students took in their major disciplines…were quite effective in making explicit the often tacit expectations of the field and could usefully be instituted in other disciplines. (124)
It is clear that the next major transition in their development as writers took place as they struggled to integrate the content knowledge, concepts, and research and writing conventions in their major disciplines. (124)
What is the outcome of four years of development?
Recommendations for Instruction
How can learning communities best provide the scaffolding to support learningers in their development from novice college writers to more mature adults able to take on complex problems requiring advanced abilities to communicate? (129)
It is difficult to maintain the balance between focusing on content and focusing on students own literacy development. (133)
1. Rethink student work as “literacy tasks” and not “writing assignments.” Focus on writing “differently,” not just “better.”
The students in our study were not bothered much by problems of punctuation and spelling, and yet they struggled with new tasks—how to approach a problem, how to find information, how to read difficult material, how to write in an appropriate academic style, and, especially, how to apply all of the new concepts nad content knowledge they were rapidly acquiring. In addition, they needed to develop writing processes for actually producing coherent texts during the same time, which was never enough, allotted for sometimes many different writing projects. (130)
2. Conduct an audit of writing within academic majors or other specific programs and fill in gaps in literacy instruction.
…where will students learn the concepts and skills to meet the literacy demands of their disciplines? (130)
The model, in many courses, of two or three tests and a paper at the end of the semester does not give most students sufficient practice and feedback to become proficient [disciplinary writers]. (131)
Writing-intensive courses should not merely assign more writing but need to provide direct instruction and practice in using sources, reporting data, applying concepts, constructing arguments, and writing in genres appropriate for the discipline. (132)
3. Develop projects and assignments that will challenge all students even if students finished products are less than perfect.
Student work looks more finished and competent when studnts have less challenging assignments that they already know how to do (134).
Students’ progress [with new and challenging assignments and tasks] can be slow, and we need to be able to tolerate less than perfect trial runs. (135)
Professors may think of explaining and modeling what is expected in literacy tasks as hand holding or remedial work. In fact, this support helps students bridge the gap between what they can already do and the new tasks they face in college. (135)
Three Simple Instructional Suggestions:
1. Give assignments in writing with specific guidelines for how the work will be evaluated.
2. Give examples/models of student work which illustrate successful and unsuccessful attempts to meet the terms of specific assignments.
3. Provide detailed feedback to students on their writing, but less is more. Three to five pointed comments, in order of significance/priority, is probably sufficient in most cases.
4. Provide scaffolding to support development by directly teaching discipline-specific research and writing skills, using grading strategically to reward improvement, scheduling interim deadlines for longer projects, and requiring classroom workshops, study groups, and teacher conferences.
…students often do not demonstrate the full range of their literacy skills. In most cases, the papers they turn in to professors are essentially first-drafts. While students may revise as they write and leave a litte time for a quick edit, their papers are usually produced close to final deadlines. (137-38)
…if professors are dissatisfied with student writing, they may try to intervene in students’ usual last-minute, one-draft approach to writing…our study showed that at Pepperdine, if not at other universities, students are very grade-conscious and interpret the grade on a paper as the strongest signal of how well they are doing. (138)
How students are graded can influence their writing processes. When grades are focused entirely on a final written product, students may underestimate the literacy tasks they are being asked to complete. They may see the task as simply “writing up,” as quickly as possible, the information most readily available. On the other hand, dividing the points for a project into separate grades for an initial research report, a preliminary draft, and a revision signals to students that the professor takes seriously each step in the process. (138)
Students usually do not have the time to seek peer review and write multiple drafts unless a course is structured to encourage a more extended writing process for challenging writing tasks. Editing is often last-minute and frequently haphazard. (74)
5. Build into individual courses and majors time for reflection and self-assessment to build meta-cognitive awareness.
But what do we actually know about how the writing of students develops over the course of several years of college? This longitudinal study attempts to answer this question for a group of 20 students at a midsize independent university by following their development as writers over four years (xi)
…examining literacy in college from the students’ perspective (xiv)
My analysis of the data collected in this study supports a limited but still useful role for first-year composition, demonstrates how students do learn to write differently across the curriculum in ways that may or may not be recognized by faculty, and examines the teaching and learning practices that promote or constrain student development. (xiv)
In order to more fully understand the complex literacy tasks required in college, we asked our 20 students to collect portfolios of their writing across a variety of disciplines, to complete regular self-assessments, and to participate in a series of focus groups and interviews about their academic work. (5)
Walvoord and McCarthy (1990) demonstrate the difficulties students encounter in four disciplinary courses in business, history, human sexuality, and biology, and show how each course presents unique problems in constructing the audience and the self, stating a position, using discipline-based methods of support, and organizing and managing complexity.
Walvoord and McCarthy, L (1990). Thinking and writing in college: A naturalistic study of students in four disciplines. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
For students, each semester in college involves various types of transitions, and each course, each professor, each task represents a more or less different ecological environment… The variety of these expectations is often underestimated by faculty who again fantasize writing as a stable skill that can be applied in different circumstances rather than as a complex set of abilities developing unevenly through many periods of transition requiring a variety of different roles. (23-24)
My analysis challenges the myth that writing is a stable, unitary skill that can be learned once and then simply applied in new circumstances. It shows that the problems students face in writing in college are not primarily grammatical. Instead, our study students demonstrate that even writers who enter college proficient in constructing simple reports or arguments will struggle with tasks that require more complex analysis and methods of presentation. However, it is precisely in struggling with these challenging tasks that they develop new skills. (27)
Study Design
In 1994, the General Education Committee at Seaver College (Pepperdine) decided they wanted to learn more about their General Education curriculum. Carroll was the co-director of this project. 46 incoming freshmen were randomly identified for participation, two from each freshmen seminar class in the fall of 1994. The students were offered one credit per year that they continued to participate in the study, along with a small stipend. Of the initial cohort, 30 students provided "substantial data" and 20 completed the four-year study. Of these 20, there were 16 women and four men (two African American women). Carroll and her co-director videotaped focus groups in which students discussed their initial experiences of college life and regularly collected from students either the originals or copies of all their written work (except class notes). At the end of each semester, students came to update logs cataloguing their work and to complete written self-assessments commenting on successful and unsuccessful learning experiences for each semester. Near the end of each year, writing center peer tutors conducted interviews with participants to ask them how they felt they had changed in fifteen different areas. Interviewer notes and the taped interviews were added to each students comprehensive portfolio. During their senior year, students chose from their comprehensive portfolios, collected over four year, anywhere from four to over ten pieces of work especially representative of their learning in college. These materials were placed in a smaller digital portfolio for each student. (32-35)
Of the students, Carroll writes:
If our students are representative at all, they are students on the "inside" of that boundary [referring to Mike Rose's work], though some come from families that have only recently and only narrowly crossed from the "margins" to the "mainstream" of class and culture. (39)
--------------------
This study seeks to fill the gap between the perception that students “can’t write” and the reality that the thousands of students who earn undergraduate degrees each year are apparently able to “write” well enough to satisfy the requirements of their various academic programs. (26)
Origin/Background of Study: In 1994, the General Education Committee at Seaver College set about to assess student learning in the general education core curriculum. A randomly selected sample of 46 incoming first-year students were identified and selected to include in the study. Of the initial cohort, 30 students provided substantial data and 20 completed the four-year longitudinal study. (32)
Methodology: Qualitative (interviews, interviewer notes, artifact collection, focus groups)
Method (32-34):
- Initial videotaped focus groups on students initial experiences of college life.
- Ongoing semester-by-semester collection of student work in portfolios.
- End-of-term self-cataloguing of student work, student self-assessment of learning.
- End of year interviews with writing center peer-tutors to explain how and why the felt they had changed in 15 different areas related to college life and work.
- Senior year--Digital Portfolios collecting 4-10 samples of their work “especially representative of their learning in college” (35)
Representation: If our study students are representative at all, they are the students on the “inside” of that boundary, though some come from families that have only recently and only narrowly crossed from the “margins” to the “mainstream” of class and culture… The literacy practices analyzed in this volume, then, are not simply a generic set of skills, practices indicative of the way advanced literacy in college must be or ought to be, but the specific practices of a specific group of students in a particular time and place. (39).
Findings
Our study challenges the myth that even students who by most traditional methods would be considered “prepared” for college “can’t write” and shows that the problems students face in academic writing are not primarily grammatical. It demonstrates that college writers who may be proficient in constructing simple reports or arguments will struggle with tasks that require more complex analysis and methods of presentation. However, it is in struggling with these tasks that they develop new skills. College faculty members can support novice writers in these periods of transition as students work out the strategies they need to tak on new roles as writers (118-119).
From our study, what can we conclude about the role of the ubiquitous first year composition course in developing profiency in writing presumed to be useful in college or the workplace?
…based on the experience of our study students, I would argue that …such a course serves as a useful, albeit limited, purpose as a transition from high school and other previous writing experiences to writing in the university. (119)
…first-year writing courses [should be viewed as] a point of transition, not a final destination or a detour to fix literacy problems before students begin their real journey (123).
Adding an Upper-Level Writing Requirement
In addition to a one semester first-year writing course, we have recommended, based on our longitudinal study, that Pepperdine, like many other universities, add an upper-level writing requirement to focus on writing in a student’s major discipline…We found that the research and writing courses that some of our study students took in their major disciplines…were quite effective in making explicit the often tacit expectations of the field and could usefully be instituted in other disciplines. (124)
It is clear that the next major transition in their development as writers took place as they struggled to integrate the content knowledge, concepts, and research and writing conventions in their major disciplines. (124)
What is the outcome of four years of development?
- Writing assignments in college generally call for high levels of critical literacy, typically requiring skills in researching, reading complex texts, understanding of key disciplinary concepts, and strategies for synthesizing, analyzing, and responding critically to new information, usually within a limited time frame. (9)
- Faculty are likely to underestimate how much writing tasks differ from course to course, from discipline to discipline, and from professor to professor.
- Lessons learned in first-year writing courses do not directly transfer to students’ work in their major areas of study.
- Students who begin as fluent, effective writers generally continue to be successful, though their writing sometimes appears to be weaker when they encounter new and unfamiliar expectations.
- Students who demonstrate difficulty both in writing and learning content material, nonetheless, do come to better understand the genres and demands of their disciplines and show increasing (but not perfect) ability to write in these genres. Professors reading individual papers in upper-division courses are unlikely to observe this growth over time, and their comments reveal both their patient efforts to help students improve and their frustration that some of their junior and senior students “still can’t write.”
- Students’ literacy develops because students must take on new and difficult roles that challenge their abilities as writers. In fact, student writing may sometimes need to get “worse” before it can get “better.” Because many college writing tasks are new to students, they will need repeated practice to become proficient.
- Comparing the writing of students across disciplines on standardized assessment tests cannot capture the diversity of their literacy experiences or their ability to use literacy successfully in negotiating the demands of their major disciplines. (9-10)
Recommendations for Instruction
How can learning communities best provide the scaffolding to support learningers in their development from novice college writers to more mature adults able to take on complex problems requiring advanced abilities to communicate? (129)
It is difficult to maintain the balance between focusing on content and focusing on students own literacy development. (133)
1. Rethink student work as “literacy tasks” and not “writing assignments.” Focus on writing “differently,” not just “better.”
The students in our study were not bothered much by problems of punctuation and spelling, and yet they struggled with new tasks—how to approach a problem, how to find information, how to read difficult material, how to write in an appropriate academic style, and, especially, how to apply all of the new concepts nad content knowledge they were rapidly acquiring. In addition, they needed to develop writing processes for actually producing coherent texts during the same time, which was never enough, allotted for sometimes many different writing projects. (130)
2. Conduct an audit of writing within academic majors or other specific programs and fill in gaps in literacy instruction.
…where will students learn the concepts and skills to meet the literacy demands of their disciplines? (130)
The model, in many courses, of two or three tests and a paper at the end of the semester does not give most students sufficient practice and feedback to become proficient [disciplinary writers]. (131)
Writing-intensive courses should not merely assign more writing but need to provide direct instruction and practice in using sources, reporting data, applying concepts, constructing arguments, and writing in genres appropriate for the discipline. (132)
3. Develop projects and assignments that will challenge all students even if students finished products are less than perfect.
Student work looks more finished and competent when studnts have less challenging assignments that they already know how to do (134).
Students’ progress [with new and challenging assignments and tasks] can be slow, and we need to be able to tolerate less than perfect trial runs. (135)
Professors may think of explaining and modeling what is expected in literacy tasks as hand holding or remedial work. In fact, this support helps students bridge the gap between what they can already do and the new tasks they face in college. (135)
Three Simple Instructional Suggestions:
1. Give assignments in writing with specific guidelines for how the work will be evaluated.
2. Give examples/models of student work which illustrate successful and unsuccessful attempts to meet the terms of specific assignments.
3. Provide detailed feedback to students on their writing, but less is more. Three to five pointed comments, in order of significance/priority, is probably sufficient in most cases.
4. Provide scaffolding to support development by directly teaching discipline-specific research and writing skills, using grading strategically to reward improvement, scheduling interim deadlines for longer projects, and requiring classroom workshops, study groups, and teacher conferences.
…students often do not demonstrate the full range of their literacy skills. In most cases, the papers they turn in to professors are essentially first-drafts. While students may revise as they write and leave a litte time for a quick edit, their papers are usually produced close to final deadlines. (137-38)
…if professors are dissatisfied with student writing, they may try to intervene in students’ usual last-minute, one-draft approach to writing…our study showed that at Pepperdine, if not at other universities, students are very grade-conscious and interpret the grade on a paper as the strongest signal of how well they are doing. (138)
How students are graded can influence their writing processes. When grades are focused entirely on a final written product, students may underestimate the literacy tasks they are being asked to complete. They may see the task as simply “writing up,” as quickly as possible, the information most readily available. On the other hand, dividing the points for a project into separate grades for an initial research report, a preliminary draft, and a revision signals to students that the professor takes seriously each step in the process. (138)
Students usually do not have the time to seek peer review and write multiple drafts unless a course is structured to encourage a more extended writing process for challenging writing tasks. Editing is often last-minute and frequently haphazard. (74)
5. Build into individual courses and majors time for reflection and self-assessment to build meta-cognitive awareness.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Reading List
- Anne Beaufort: College Writing and Beyond (click here for review
- Anne Beaufort: Writing in the Real World (study of development, but after college)
- Lee Ann Carroll: Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers (NWP review here.)
- Nancy Sommers/Laura Saltz: "The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshmen Year"
- Anne Herrington/Marcia Curtis: Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing Development in College
- Marilyn Sternglass: Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level
- Rich Haswell: Gaining Ground in College
- Howard Tinberg and Jean Paul Nadeau The Community College Writer (2010)
Friday, May 6, 2011
Muted Voices: High School Teachers, Composition, And The College Imperative
Most high school teachers remain committed and allegiant to a formalist approach to the teaching of literature with occasional nods to what Kathleen McCormick names expressivist (reader response) approaches to literature, though, as Applebee discovered in his survey of high school literature instruction, such nods are primarily employed only as a preliminary means of generating student interest or as a segue to journal responses rather than as a means toward genuine textual interpretation (Literature).
“Recently, as I’ve heard more from students who have gone on to college, I’ve come to realize that my own college experience is not reflective of the experience most of my students are likely to have. I feel like I need to keep this in mind when I’m tempted to justify my instructional strategies this way.”
High school English teachers are less prone to disciplinary reappraisal and reconstruction. College English studies continues to push the borders of its disciplinary lines of inquiry, but the high school English teacher realizes what the teacher of first-year college comp also realizes: the vast majority of one’s students will not become English majors.
BIG PICTURE: My purposes in exploring teacher perceptions of the tacit college imperative they have assumed is motivated by my concern that we do our colleagues in the schools a disservice by not including them more fully and more frequently in our disciplinary conversations.
No teacher preparation program can adequately address everything prospective teachers should know before they enter the classroom, but since much of the daily work of high school teachers is influenced by the prospect of college English, English education programs should provide their students with at least a sense of what actually occurs in the English department’s freshman writing program. College writing programs do themselves, local high school teachers, and incoming students a disservice by not inviting both prospective and current classroom teachers into their programs to participate in collaborative conversations about the objectives of their programs and their expectations for the students who enroll. Articulating a curricular sequence between the schools and the colleges is not likely to occur, and may not even be entirely desirable, but clarifying for high school teachers the kinds of work assigned and skills engaged in the first-year course can occur with modest investments in time and energy by all those involved.
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