CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: D.01 Across the Drafts: Responding to Student Writing—A Longitudinal Perspective Perhaps the most provocative session I attended was Nancy Sommers’ presentation of the new research she had done on responding to student writing. It was a conference featured session for good reason. In this session, Sommers added to her earlier important work on responding to student writing (“Responding to Student Writing,” 1982) by reporting on a massive longitudinal study of student writing from across the disciplines at Harvard. The session began with a video Sommers made that highlighted student and faculty interviews. Then the session moved to Sommers’ comments on the study’s results and closed with a brief though lively Q&A session. The major findings were: that an interpersonal relationship is built between teacher and student through the response process; that students want teachers to talk to them, not to the papers, through their comments; that students will sometimes dismiss or ignore the comments regardless of how carefully you’ve crafted them (ok, perhaps we all knew that one); that responses can sometimes shape student confidence and interest in a particular intellectual path; and that perhaps the worst kind of response from a student standpoint is no response at all or the cryptic set of symbols such as check marks and squiggly lines. The latter example came from a student featured in the video and was quite funny—the student knew that his professor liked something he wrote if there were straight underlines and disliked what he had written if the lines were squiggly. Furthermore, the magnitude of the waves often signaled the degree of disapproval. The room was so packed a few minutes before Sommers was to begin speaking that the Moscone Center staff had to relocate the adjacent session, pull back the curtain room divider, and allow people to fill up the next room (and the featured session room was already large). This overflowing response might have been partly due to the fact that Sommers was going to show and give away copies of the video. (I admit, I was looking forward to getting what I perceived would be a great resource for workshops on responding to student writing on my own campus. If you’d like to see the video, it will evidently be online as streaming video soon.) I suspect the popularity of the video also was an indication of just how important the process of student writing is to writing teachers. So many of us teach 3 or 4 writing courses a semester, collecting hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing to which we feel we must respond carefully, thoroughly, and cogently. If we were to add up the time spent reading and responding to student projects in a lifetime as writing instructors, we might seriously reevaluate our life paths, yet we continue to do this difficult and, most of us feel, important work. And the intangible dimensions of the response process (do students really read what we write? do they understand what we write if they do?) can leave us feeling a sense of dread each time we face a stack of projects. The video depicted students who were largely very engaged with their professors’ comments as well as professors very in touch with what their students seemed to need from the response process. Though the sense of grading and responding dread for teachers was noted, the participants in the interviews seemed to be slightly above average in terms of their investment in the process. In the presentation that followed the video, Sommers expanded upon the video’s more anecdotal information. Particularly interesting, yet not entirely surprising, is that outside the core writing curriculum, the study indicated students rarely are offered any writing instruction and are equally rarely asked to revise. Sommers noted that in these classes, the importance of the feedback was heightened. It was virtually the only contact they had with professors regarding their writing. This information may prove very helpful to those of us trying to work on WID on our own campuses. As my institution, North Dakota State University, moves to a vertical writing curriculum and as we begin the process of screening course proposals in the disciplines for writing intensiveness, and finally as we become more involved in training and talking to faculty across the disciplines about how to best teach writing, I can envision using the Harvard video to start conversation about this important part of writing instruction. My primary critique or concern about the study is that such thorough studies often happen only at research and/or extremely well funded institutions where the student populations are above average. Harvard students are hardly representative of the student populations with whom most of us deal. This issue emerged in the question and answer period as an attendee mentioned that the students in her classes don’t often say “thereafter.” Sommers offered an only somewhat satisfying response, indicating that she thought we could do this type of research even on a very small scale in our own institutions. The question she felt was most relevant for us all to ask was “What has been your best writing experience?” While asking this question will certainly not yield us the mounds of data and the depth of insight into our students’ experiences with feedback that the Harvard study offers to its comparable institutions, it might provide at least a starting point. |
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