Session Results: Baselines (Keith Rhodes)

INTERESTS: Baseline outcomes: what are we getting now? (related to TQM pressures and ethnographic study interests)

PARTICIPANTS:

• Mary Pinard, Babson College
• Thomas Goodman, University of Miami (Florida)
• Pauline Woodward, Endicott College
• J. L. McClure, Kirkwood Community College

Entry Outcomes

• Processes
• write one draft to order, often right before due dates
• follow or pretend to follow process sequences when they are part of the assignment
• Texts
• five-paragraph essays, usually without genuine hypotheses
• stream of personal consciousness
• idiosyncratic assortments of creative and process writings
• Knowledges (from student viewpoint; no consent implied)
• the assessment of writing is highly subjective, and the best writing tactic (though it is not highly reliable) is to find out what the teachers want and give it to them as directly as possible
• grammar, though highly unavailable to learning efforts, is the most valuable aspect of writing
• Understandings (from student viewpoint; no consent implied)
• the highest value in their education is efficiency: the best tactic is that which earns the highest grade with the least effort
• written language is an opaque surface, read and "gotten" according to how "smart" one accidentally happens to be (or how fully one has been let in on all the secret "hidden meanings")

• Processes
• ability to use writing processes effectively to improve papers when those processes are built into assignments - better socialization into the ability to work on making meaning in writing with the help of others
• effective use of student networks and drop/add to scope out teachers and select a class that permits them to get through the course with the highest efficiency
• rough ability to read for analysis, synthesis, and summary
• very rough ability to write analyses, syntheses, and summaries
• greater confidence as writers within a wider range of genres
• on average, ability to write with better argumentative structure, though the range of resulting ability varies wildly
• on average, ability to write with greater correctness and style, though the range of resulting ability varies wildly
• Texts
• essays that complicate the use of five-paragraph structure
• researched argumentative essays using MLA style, albeit with characteristic weakness in incorporating analysis, synthesis and summary
• a wide range of process writings - free-writing, invention heuristics, journals, reflections, etc.
• (either limited discussion limited the responses here or the limited number of possible responses limited discussion)
• Knowledges (from student viewpoint; no consent implied)
• that the assessment of writing is highly subjective, and that the best writing tactic - though it is only moderately reliable - is to find out which teachers want what students think they do best
• grammar, though highly unavailable to learning efforts, is the most valuable aspect of writing outside of first year composition classes
• process writings, though their effective use is highly unavailable to learning efforts, are valued highly by first year composition teachers
• reading well is trickier but more possible than they had thought, and the techniques of analysis, synthesis, and summary offer real advantages
• Understandings (from student viewpoint; no consent implied)
• assignments that assist students with using better processes do produce better writings, even if there is no point using better processes for assignments that do not have such assistance built into them
• The implicit invitation to join the discourse community of the most exploited and financially under-achieving people on campus is not attractive, especially given that there seems to be more than enough competition for the privilege of suffering this particular form of masochism
• there is no external control on the subjectivity of composition teachers when it comes to grades, other than whatever rhetorical pressure students can bring to bear on their teachers
• cooperative work on writings is worth the surrender of a bit of the individualistic resistance to seemingly "inefficient" group-work methods

Though small, this group represented a wide and well-distributed range of institution types with divergent student populations. Three interesting general points shape particular results. First, both within and across institutions, features of inscriptive skill at all levels - e.g., usage, structure, or generic flexibility - varied too widely to be generalized or productively averaged, even while improvement in those areas tended to be consistent among students who finished the first-year sequences. Second, while a certain degree of that improvement tended to result from mere sorting-by-failure, the main sorting dynamic seemed to be students' willingness to engage the socialization aspects of the class productively. Third, we found ourselves highly sensitized by this discussion to notice how ambitious the desires of other groups appeared to be, and how extensively (and possibly narrowly) those desires sought to replicate the conventions of our own community of discourse.

Perhaps the one further outcome that appeared to be the most possible and useful next step isleading students to value recursive writing and reading intrinsically, and not just because we value it or because some assignment builds it in. Conceivably, if students can learn to build processes into assignments on their own, they will be more successful writers and will keep their writing skills more refreshed throughout their college careers.

RECORDER'S REFLECTION ON THE PROCESS

The distorted mirror-image here of the composition teacher as an exploited masochist (and potential sadist, then) with incomprehensible demands and capricious power to reward or punish is one outcome I definitely want to change. Good outcomes statements should assist us in all aspects of that transformation. Such statements probably need to build out of the credibility we gain from teaching useful analytic reading strategies.

Respond to this leader by e-mail

Return to Leaders menu; Return to Results menu