"The Will to Revise: Commenting, Revision, and Motivation in College Students"

About the Author

Elizabeth Bracey is a second-year graduate student in the English program at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. She earned her BA in forensic psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she began working as a tutor at the college’s writing center. She continues to work with John Jay College students to improve their writing and their approaches to revision.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology

Results

Discussion

Works Cited 

Introduction

It is the hope of classroom instructors and of writing tutors that students will feel motivation to perform their best on assignments. Equally, the instructor or tutor hopes that students will ask for help if they are unsure of how to proceed. However, it often seems that students do not want help and that, when they receive it, particularly in the form of professor or tutor comments, students are hard-pressed to take the advice that is offered to them. In fact, students seem mostly to report concern for problems that appear on the syntactical level. Nancy Sommers explains that this inability to revise beyond syntax and word choice is a critical problem in student writing (“Responding to Student Writing”  124). For many college students, coherence and logic in writing are secondary concerns if they are concerns at all. However, the process of revision may also be contingent upon the comments of professors and tutors and the way in which these comments might motivate the student to take more than a cursory glance at his or her work.

On the one hand, it is possible that students view revision as a negative task. In Nancy Sommers’s view, students do not want to make global-level revisions because of fear or nervousness or because of the perception of comments and revision as punitive (“Between the Drafts”). Reinforcing this idea, Chris Anson points out that students’ understanding of the teachers’ expectations may also affect what becomes important in writing, prompting them to focus overwhelmingly on one writing component and neglecting to acknowledge others. As a result, students who do not acknowledge both global and sentence-level problems may appear unmotivated or lazy in their approach to revision. However, students’ motivation to take a comprehensive approach to revision is more likely to be based in their expectations of themselves and their professors’ expectations of them. In light of this, it is relevant to ask what might help a student to become more engaged in his or her own process of revision. That is, what interventions might encourage students to think more critically about the writing they do and how to approach revisions to it?  Indeed, there are many motivators to comprehensive revision other than one’s relationship to a professor. Social, environmental, and even developmental factors are significant areas of consideration in evaluating students’ motivation.  However, this project aims to address the role of pedagogical practice in motivation, particularly the influence of the teacher comments on motivating students to revise, since commenting and motivation are rarely assessed together, and thus a critical part of students’ performances on writing tasks has not been evaluated.

Studies addressing students’ motivation to write well have examined many critical influences. Researchers have evaluated motivation according to students’ perceptions of themselves and perceptions of their futures as well as their perception of coursework as being too difficult or too simple to warrant revision[1].   However, the relationship between commenting and student motivation has not been assessed thoroughly. Students’ performances in class are often internally motivated by their perceptions of the facility or difficulty of an assignment. That is, students are likely to feel motivated or unmotivated based on the level of challenge that they perceive to exist in a class assignment (Wardle 74). Elizabeth Wardle elaborates on this idea in her article “Understanding ‘Transfer’ from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study.” Wardle’s study of seven students, from their freshman year composition classes until approximately their junior years in college, found that motivation played an integral role in the students’ abilities to apply information learned in freshman composition to other aspects of writing. Wardle found that students who perceived their professors’ expectations to be low often did not feel as motivated to make significant changes to their writing styles or to their work as they did when they found that professors’ expectations were higher (74).  Moreover, Wardle found that assignments that might be considered “engaging” or challenging were often perceived to be harder, which prompted students to select easier assignments or to drop classes rather than feel motivated to work harder (78). The result was often that the students’ grades were not as high, which may, in turn, have affected the motivation of the student to continue trying to improve his or her writing at all. This finding calls into question students’ expectations of themselves as writers and the perceived need they have for help based on those expectations.

While some students may find teacher expectations to be the factor that motivates or fails to motivate their writing, other students may expect that they are unable to write at an appropriate or successful level. As a result, students may develop a sense of dependence on instruction and commenting that may impede their ability to revise on their own (“Between the Drafts” 124). Nancy Sommers cogently addresses the issue of academic authority in her essay “Between the Drafts,” in which she emphasizes the feeling that a student must create an artificial version of him or herself in order to communicate with the appropriate audience. This issue of authority is extremely relevant when considering student response to teacher comments as well as the approach to revision. In “Responding to Student Writing,” Sommers points out that students do not want to “take the risk of changing anything” (124) that has not been commented on, since students may feel that they are not authoritative enough to make this type of judgment. Therefore, fear is part of what motivates student revision or lack thereof.

On the other hand, studies seeking to examine student cognition and self-efficacy in relation to writing successes have found that students whose self-efficacy is disproportionate to their actual abilities are less likely to seek help, regardless of the suggestions of others that they might benefit from additional support (Williams & Takaku; Patchdan, Charney & Schunn).  This suggests that some students do not seek help even if their professors feel it is necessary because the students do not feel as though they need it. The students’ perceptions are that they write adequately and that they perform well. Students who have this expectation but who have self-efficacies that are disproportionate to their abilities often blame low grades or struggles with writing on external factors or avoid actively seeking help (McCarthy, Meier, & Rinderer qtd. in Williams & Takaku  3). For example, students might justify poor performance by explaining that the professor’s grading system was simply too difficult or that the professor was incompetent rather than speculating that they might need to improve aspects of their writing and approaches to revision. Therefore, when a student is recommended to the writing center because of the professor’s perception of the student’s need for help, it is likely that the student will not be as motivated to revise his or her own writing since the student has not recognized the perceived need on his or her own. This aspect is especially important to consider in a study of commenting and students’ revisions based on comments, since many students attend tutoring based on the suggestion of their professors.