During the second part of class we discussed Data Set 4: 4 papers with teacher comments. We spent some time discussing the comments: their purpose (why teachers might create them), the form different comments take, and how students might receive different comments.
For the different purposes comments might serve (I did not get my notes for this, so this is probably not exactly what we had on the board), our discussion put forward the following.
Purpose for teachers comments:
to get students to revise
to support students in taking authority over their own work
to provide the teachers perspective on "how student is doing"
to give readerly feedback (say what was understood)
to motivate students to write
You then worked in groups to think about the categories for analysis from Ferris/Martin, the different purposes for giving comments, or some other set of features of comments on student writing => and to come up with research questions that might help teachers/students understand more about how teacher commenting works (what it does, what makes it effective, how it works, and so on).
Silvia, Carolina,
The groups came up with the following:
1. How does poor proofreading in comments affect the effectiveness of commenting?
2. How do questions work in comments3. How do teachers use comments to give the student the option to express his/her own ideas versus demanding that students comply with teacher directions? What factors would make these different approaches appropriate?
4. Analysis of headnote/endnote how they work versus how sidenotes work
5. How does the amount of text selected for side comments affect student response?
6. How does specificity of comments work in commenting? What does it do & how does it contribute to (or not) comments effectiveness in achieving their purpose?
7. In head/ending comments, how does the use of examples contribute to effectiveness?
8 How do imperative comments work in getting students to revise
9. What are the effects of placing the head note at the beginning versus the end?
10. What does it mean that there are not grammar comments?
Each group chose a question, but I didn't get the timing right for this class, and we did not have a clear discussion of what to do for the Blog before some of you left. I thought it over and I don't really think we had a clear enough discussion for you to follow on the post I set up in the last chaotic minutes of class - so I am assigning completely different post (see below).
Next week we will talk some more about how to set up and follow through with the analysis of a research question. You did a great job last week on the ethnographic notes, and I don't want to confuse you. .
For next week:
Blog 6: Set up the analysis to answer the question chosen by your group by doing the following
1. Identify your research question & discuss what features of the comments you will need to characterize in order to answer it.
2. State the categories for your analysis (for example, what features will you use to determine "effectiveness"? or to characterize headnotes versus sidenotes? or to characterize the different "selections" made by side comments?
3. If you chose a question about "effectiveness" = describe the criteria/process for determining the comment's effectiveness which purpose(s) (from class discussion) the comments are effective for.
Read: Gee, Introduction to Discourse Analysis
In this reading, pay attention to the way he talks about Discourse communities, identity, and his discussion of how to analyze talk (transcripts).
Then, for next class, look through Data Set 5 (posted below ).
Come to class with some ideas about questions you might ask to use this data set to study Discourse communities, how individuals represent themselves as belonging to those communities (or not), and what discourse analysis can show about speaker's relationships to the material they are talking about.
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