Introduction

Dear Readers,

Welcome back from Spring Break. Today the Hostos WAC Program is pleased to introduce you to our new monthly digest, an annotated and curated collection of articles focused on writing and reading instruction. The motivation for this digest comes from our desire to share the knowledge we gain as WAC Fellows with the wider Hostos community. Writing and reading pedagogy are a rich discipline – with this digest we aim to share some of this richness with you.

Each edition will focus a central theme, with annotated links to a few theme-related articles. Some texts reflect the latest research while others revisit seminal texts in the field. Articles may be notes, commentaries, book chapters, or peer-reviewed journal articles, and our brief annotations outline what we find interesting and thematically relevant about each article. Even if you don’t read all of the articles, we hope you’ll still get an idea of the writing and reading related research that is taking place.

Our theme for this month is Responding to Student Writing in an Online Environment. In our first section, we highlight pieces by Peter Elbow and Kelli Shermeyer and a “WAC Classic” by John Bean. Each addresses some practical and pedagogical concerns around instructor responses. In our second section we spotlight six academic articles. They focus on:

• grading and comment formatting
• blogging as a teaching tool
• differences in written versus recorded feedback
• the use of online whiteboard tools in writing instruction
• the perceived differences between instructor and peer feedback.

In this edition we also showcase a short video interview with Professor Elizabeth Porter from the English Department. Professor Porter discusses her use of the online tool, Hypothesis, in synchronous online teaching.

We’re excited for you to read our first edition of Waking Up with WAC, and look forward to sharing more of our love for writing and reading pedagogy with you.

Your friends,

The Hostos WAC Fellows
Allison Cabana, Ivana Durovic, André Eliatamby, François Kiper, Nic Rios

Responding to Student Writing Online: An Overview

Here are some foundational texts on responding to student writing that we have found especially useful.

“About Responding to Student Writing” by Peter Elbow urges us to “at least do no harm” with our responses. His advice is to be humble and truthful in our feedback by responding rather as a curious reader than an all-knowing authority figure. Students are more likely to benefit from a few carefully written comments on strategically picked issues, than a mountain of vague comments like “awkward” or “too many anecdotes” which sound more like verdicts than constructive feedback.

“Writing Comments on Students’ Papers” by John Bean explores how to engage students across writing and revision tasks. Bean asks us to consider what a useful response to student writing could look like and offers several guiding questions: How do we encourage students to use feedback in ways that are helpful and encouraging to them (even when including correction or critique)? And, how do we hone our own writing and communication skills to provide feedback that can be useful and generative? There are many tips and questions in the text – but perhaps, the most important notion we gleaned from it is a reminder that student writing, educator feedback, and revisions are all part of an ongoing relationship with our students. Bean includes concrete suggestions for professors to tailor their responses in order to provide positive and generative forms of critique and reminds us to reflect on our own processes of writing and re-writing to be helpful-not-hostile writing facilitators.

“Responding to Student Writing in Online Courses” by Kelli Shermeyer contains a wealth of useful tips in its short page count. She notes that online courses put more pressure on instructors to communicate well. Giving direct, useful, digestible feedback is more important than ever. Shermeyer recommends taking advantage of the affordances and rhetoric of electronic communication, with multiple inspiring examples. The article concludes with an annotated bibliography for digging deeper into these issues.

Interview with Elizabeth Porter

Prof. Elizabeth Porter chatted with WAC Fellow François Kiper about how she uses the online tool Hypothesis to respond to student writing. Click here to learn more about about her experience. (12:30)

The Research Says…

Synchronous online conference-based instruction: A study of whiteboard interactions and student writing by Beth Hewitt presents the results of a small-scale linguistic analysis of synchronous writing instruction delivered using an electronic whiteboard. Hewitt’s study fills an important research gap by examining the linguistic functions of “online talk” in these online settings. We recommend reading this article if you’re interested in online whiteboard instruction or in some real-world data on the sorts of interactions that take place in an synchronous writing environment.

Student revision with peer and expert reviewing by Kwangsu Cho and Charles MacArthur investigates the effects of peer versus expert feedback on student writing revisions. Their analysis focuses on the differences in feedback types between peers and experts, how that feedback was incorporated in revisions, and how the revisions affected writing quality. Interestingly, Cho and MacArthur find that multiple-peer review motivates a larger amount changes to writing and ultimately leads to better writing quality when compared to single-expert review. Unsurprisingly, peers were also more encouraging and praising of writing than instructors. This is a great article to read if you’re interested in incorporating student peer review into your course.

Online Technologies for Teaching Writing: Students React to Teacher Response in Voice and Written Modalities by Dr. Loel Kim is an interesting investigative foray into how educators can give feedback to students in an online modality. The article utilizes an experimental design to test different receptions to feedback on written work that was given using either (a) pre-recorded voice modality or (b) conventional written comments. The researchers found a mix of results; however, Kim suggests an important component of WAC pedagogy in the conclusion. Kim suggests that we engage with the writing process as a relational endeavor. The modality of the feedback, the teachers themselves, and the type of assignment being addressed all made a difference in student perception. While many things have changed since the early 2000s, Kim’s reminder that writing in a course is an extension of the relationship between students and teachers is helpful and energizing.

Pedagogical Blogging for University Courses by Brad Blackstone and Chris Harwood provides an overview of using blogs as a pedagogical tool. Blogging is an excellent way for students to interact meaningfully with the course materials, with the professor, and with each other. By assigning individual blogs and having students interact in blog groups, professors can promote peer feedback. This encourages a community of practice among students and professors and may improve learning.

Responding to student writing online: Tracking student interactions with instructor feedback in a Learning Management System by Angela Laflen and Michelle Smith is useful to anybody interested in increasing the likelihood of students’ looking at the feedback online. The researchers found that students are much more likely to open the feedback document when that is also the only place they can see their grade, and much less likely to look at feedback if their grades are available separately. Also, the interest in the feedback on the first writing assignment of the semester is relatively high, while it drops dramatically for the final assignment.

Until Next Time…

We hope you enjoyed our second edition of The WAC Reader. This semester, we plan on organizing a time to discuss some of these issues at Hostos and come up with ideas for resolving them. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this initiative! If you have a moment, please take our quick Google Forms survey linked below.