Week 3... the correct one!

As I suspected, the previous Yancey article was not the correct one, although I found it to be interesting and pertinent to our discussions. Here's the correct review...

Kathleen Blake Yancey describes portfolios as diverse cultural artifacts, collection devices, and assessment tools that are a means of education reform to combat those assessments and strategies that are uniform and standardized.

I particularly find the individualized nature of portfolios to be appealing. It is, of course, highly beneficial to all classrooms, but I work in an alternative high school. Everything we do is individualized in nature. Yancey explains that these portfolio projects are "intended to serve the learning needs of the students in a particular classroom who are working with a particular teacher... by their very nature portfolios make possible the developmental charting of individuals, as well as a rich portrait of the writer" (4).

Yancey goes on to discuss the pedagogical approach to portfolios. Because portfolios are process centered, Yancey suggests students be asked to provide evidence of the various parts of their processes. For example, with my brainstorming binder, I could ask students to include X number of brainstorming activities in their portfolio for a given piece of writing to provide evidence of the brainstorming time that went into that work.

Next, which Yancey identifies as of special importance, are the reflections and inquiry aspects of portfolios. "The distinction between a storage folder and a portfolio is reflection, the review and consideration and narration and analysis and exploration of what learning is occurring in writing" (5). Further, Yancey states the reflective portion of portfolios should have a balance of intuition and cognition. "It may be, then, that one of the chief benefits of reflection is its role in bringing intuition both into focus and into the composing classroom" (5). This balance within reflection and inquiry requires the students to become active learners. They become responsible for their own learning.

I think getting students to adjust to this responsibility, especially my students who are all at-risk, will be challenging and take significant adjustments on the parts of both the teacher and the students. But I also think that once the changes begin to take hold, students will become more willingly involved in their own learning endeavors. I like that Yancey clarifies that portfolio pedagogy is time-intensive and that such growth does not take place over night- something I think Baker proved to be true in her experiment that I reviewed earlier!

Week 3, review 1

Review of Kathleen Blake Yancey, Introduction to Digitized Student Portfolios

Side note- I'm not certain this is the article Dr. Huot intended, but in the interest of completing it, I decided to go ahead and write and post this review while I await his confirmation. It introduces some interesting concepts!

Kathleen Blake Yancey's article sets out the uses and differences between standard portfolios and digital portfolios. She defines student portfolios as "collections of work selected from a larger archive of work, upon which the student has reflected. Portfolios can be created in many different contexts, serve various purposes, and speak to multiple audience" (16). She also details the types of print portfolios before moving into the types, uses and issues of electronic portfolios.

The first print portfolio Yancey discusses is the classroom portfolio. They vary as widely as classrooms themselves do, so the specifics of each portfolio really depends on the teacher and his / her students. They might be used to show how a student has improved as a writer or in a genre over the term, or it could be used to demonstrate understanding or local / global application of key concepts. Another class might use the portfolio to document experiments and the student's review of his or her success therein. Regardless, the key to the classroom portfolio is the reflection, which can take the form of a letter, an essay, etc.

Next, Yancey discusses program portfolios, where students use their portfolio to draw from multiple courses to satisfy program requirements in demonstrating their ability in their field or exploring future options. For example, students in a writing program might "create these portfolios to satisfy outside readers (typically faculty from the campus) that they are competent writers... [Another] portfolio invites each student to reflect on past learning as he or she plans courses, internships, and other academic experiences. This portfolio, then, is oriented toward the future as much as toward the past" (18).

Finally, Yancey explores the electronic portfolio. Of the six critical issues of electronic portfolios that she identifies, two I believe are shared within print portfolios: the role of aesthetic design and the timing of when faculty will read and review the portfolios. The other four issues are:
1. identifying the "place" where the portfolio will be accessed: on a disk, on the web;
2. exploiting appropriately the potential of the electronic environment, including hyperlinks, design of pathways for different purposes and audiences, and use of multiple kinds of information, such as graphics, sound, and video;
3. deciding how much technological skills will be required of students and faculty and what, if any, pedagogical changes will be entailed;
4. Defining options as to the "life cycle" of the electronic portfolio.

As I mentioned above, I'm not 100% this article is the one that Huot intended, but I think it brings up interesting ideas for a composition class, such as digital publishing in blogs. I think creating digital portfolios increases accessibility in some ways (granted, it limits it in others, especially if you work in a community where students have limited access to computers) that encourages reading / writing communities. It also can help foster a sense of real-world applicability because their work is not limited to the confines of the classroom.

Week 3 review 2

Review of Nancy Westrich Baker- "The Effect of Portfolio-Based Instruction on Composition Students' Final Examination Scores, Course Grades, and Attitudes Toward Writing"

Nancy Westrich Baker studied the effects of portfolio-based instruction in contrast to the standard process approach. Her study found "no significant relationship" between the two instructional types and the students' course grades / final exam scores. Further, there is no empirical evidence of any variation in student attitude towards writing as a result of the instructional strategies.

Baker quotes Elbow & Belanoff: "The ideal end of product is a population of students who have all finally passed because they have been given enough time and help to do what we ask of them" (qtd. 166). However, in Baker's study, 13 students failed the portfolio-based class; five of those students failed because they did not submit a final portfolio or make the suggested revisions. Only one student failed the standard process course.

Despite the lack of empirical data evincing attitude changes in the students (as measured by pre and post course surveys), Baker did find evidence of such a change in the students' comments and responses outside of the surveys. In regards to the portfolio-based classroom, they mentioned things such as a sense of accomplishment, increase in confidence, and a more relaxed classroom atmosphere. Further, they suggested that "portfolios may eliminate some of the negative feelings students have about grades" (167). Ultimately, 90% of the students agreed that the portfolio-based structure should be used in future composition courses.

Some drawbacks to portfolios that Baker identifies include an increased workload for teachers and a weak structure inherent to the task. However, the teachers who participated in the study did not experience these issues.

Baker's study has left me feeling a bit conflicted and in want of further research. I think, as Baker suggests, that supplemental research with instruments better suited to detecting changes may be in order. I am fairly surprised at the lack of change in performance, but this could be an issue in the system itself. "Obviously, when students have been taught to write using a method requiring multiple drafts completed over an extended period of time, the use of impromptu essays as an outcomes measure seems questionable at best. The tension between process-centered instruction and product-centered evaluation needs to be resolved through research" (170). Further, Baker is concerned- and I agree- that it is naive to assume one semester of a portfolio-based class is sufficient to change student attitudes about writing.

Week 2 review

Review of Rosemary L. Hake and Joseph M. Williams- "Style and Its Consequences: Do as I Do, Not as I Say"

Hake and Williams' experiment was fascinating to me. They hypothesized that although teachers overtly claim a preference for a clear, direct verbal style of writing, they implicitly award higher grades to the wordier, more pretentious nominal style instead. Their quandary was to prove it- for they could not seek the data they needed if teachers were aware of what the researchers were seeking. Basically, if the teachers became aware of the true nature of the research, it would activate their overt preferences for verbal style. The researchers needed to structure the experiments in such a way as to allow the subjects to respond naturally, thus demonstrating whether or not they truly reward the verbal style they claim to prefer.

To maintain a balance, the researchers provided the subjects with pairs of essays. Each essay was identical to its mate in every way save for style. They "were identical in number of paragraphs, number of sentences; in organization, logic, and content. They were identical even in such matters as handwriting and deliberately created errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage, errors we placed in identical positions in each member of each pair of papers... The styles differed in ways that we might subjectively define as direct vs. indirect, simple vs. complex, wordy vs. concise, inflated vs. plain, etc" (435).

The researchers conducted five experiments in this manner. In each of these experiments, the data showed a preference towards the nominal essays as opposed to the verbal ones. The exact percentages change in each experiment due to variations on the experiment, some driven by the researchers, some not. In the second experiment, for example, the teachers realized what they were likely being studied for, and their results fluctuated as a result. Nonetheless, they still demonstrated a preference for the wordy, nominal papers that utilize "that inflated, prolix, indirect prose that all English teachers claim to condemn but that seems to flourish" (436).

Ultimately, the researchers theorize further about the variations in nominal preference- they found upper level college composition professors to be more discriminating. They only marked a nominal-style essay higher than its verbal counterpart if the nominal paper had quality content. In paper pairs lacking quality content, the professors demonstrated a preference for the verbal. "Apparently, a nominal style and intrinsic quality reinforced one another: profound style = profound content. But they perceived a nominal style in an intrinsically bad paper as a mismatch, as an attempt to cover up an absence of substantial content with pretentiously inflated language" (440).

The high school teachers' data indicated that, regardless of the quality of the essay, the nominal style "so strongly bespoke verbal dexterity and implied intellectual maturity" that these teachers awarded these papers with higher scores (440).

Ultimately Hake and Williams state that these findings are unsurprising, and they go so far as to suggest that a "heavily nominal style is an inevitable development of an intellectually mature culture" (446). They also call for a look into our own psychology or history to determine if we can better generate strong writers through teaching or if this increasingly nominal style is inevitable.

I was a bit offended at their suggestion that high school teachers are "unsophisticated," but their research does open a number of teaching concerns that we need to focus on. This article was also quite fascinating- I want to read more on this sort of research!

2nd article, week 1

A review of Asao Inoue- "Community-based assessment pedagogy"

Asao Inoue's article addresses the issue of student involvement in the assessment process. He suggests that students, himself included, learn what good writing is by, "assessing writing [themselves] and talking to others about it" (209). He details a pedagogical approach that has students generate the standards to which they will be held and assess their proficiency against those standards as they write, assess, revise and reflect throughout the semester.

I found his article to be quite interesting and his approach is detailed out well. I particularly liked his explanation of the development of the rubric; instead of creating a final rubric at the beginning, the rubric is more fluid. The students continue to improve upon it as they become more proficient assessors as well as writers.

I am interested in the idea of applying this in my own classroom, but I think there are some limitations imposed by the demographics- specifically age. He teaches third-year university students in their early twenties. I teach 11th and 12th grade at an alternative high school where many students, some also nearing or in their early twenties (up to 21) struggle with motivation. I think in many ways Inoue's strategy would be incredibly beneficial to my students as it would give them ownership and reduce my role- a benefit because many students have had negative interactions with the "grading gods," as Carley put it in our discussions.

I think the potential obstacles reside closely alongside the characteristics that could make it successful- the students must self-regulate and be willing to see their writing as incomplete in order to improve upon it, and in an alternative setting, willingness can be difficult to find.

Ultimately, I think Inoue's work is an interesting idea that addresses the problem of assessing writing effectively. It seems to work for his classroom, and I think, with some adjustments to meet the needs of each group, it has potential for working in mine.

Review 1, week 1

Review 1, week 1: Nancy Sommers- "Responding to Student Writing"

Nancy Sommers argues that educators do not know how to comment on student writing in a way that effectively assists those students to become better writers. After detailing the theoretical motivations behind teacher commentary on student work, which consists of confirming or denying communication of meaning as well as dramatization of the role of a reader, she asks the question: "Do teachers comment and students revise as the theory predicts they should?"

In her efforts to glean the answer to this question, Sommers, alongside her colleagues Lil Brannon and Cyril Knoblach, has studied thirty-five teachers and their commentary on student work. In addition to these teachers and their associated students, they also used a computer program that analyzes writing and provides editorial comments and identifies errors such as grammar, spelling, usage, etc.

The problem Sommers identifies is that "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, students stop focusing on developing their work and simply make the changes the teacher suggests. Further, Sommers suggests that teachers demand students to accomplish impossibilities. "Students are commanded to edit and develop at the same time; the remarkable contradiction of developing a paragraph after editing the sentences in it represents the confusion we encountered in our teachers; commenting styles... The processes of revising, editing, and proofreading are collapsed and reduced to a single trivial activity" (151). Personally, I never read for grammar and spelling the first two times I look at a rough draft, and since Sommers only provides two examples in her article, I question the scope and span of her work. She does not provide any demographics of the educators- how long have they been teaching? What's their education background? I feel that in order to explore teacher commentary with more clarity, not only does she need to provide this information, but she also needs to expand her subject pool.

Sommers' final accusation is that "most teachers' comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text" (152). She argues that teacher commentary is so vague that it wouldn't matter which text it is slapped upon, it will make just as much (or little, she adds) sense. Sommers concludes with simply identifying a need for appropriate and process-oriented commenting styles to truly improve student writing, with which I agree. Teaching students that writing is a process and not a product is a step towards teaching students how to be writers. In regards to her "rubber-stamp" idea, perhaps the teachers who are writing the same comments such as "think more about your audience" might perhaps indicate a need for that teacher to reteach the concept of audience awareness as opposed to falling prey to lazy commentary.

Ultimately, I found this piece to be interesting yet weak. While it is true that we need a stronger focus on process as opposed to product, I did not find the statements she makes about teacher commentary, most of which were basic generalities, to be true in a hard-and-fast sense. She seems to either suggest that teachers are becoming more like computers (which speaks to me about the state of assessing and education in general as opposed to strictly composition instruction) or that computers can do the job better than what is being done now ("The sharp contrast between the teachers' comments and those of the computer highlighted how arbitrary and idiosyncratic most of our teachers' comments are. Besides, the calm, reasonable language of the computer provided quite a contrast to the hostility and mean-spiritedness of most of the teachers' comments" (149).). I am put off by both and she lost this reader early in her paper with that implication.