"The Will to Revise: Commenting, Revision, and Motivation in College Students"
About the AuthorElizabeth 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 |
Literature ReviewPaul R. Pintrich and Teresa Garcia elaborate on the concept of self-efficacy and its relationship to motivation in student learning in their study of student motivation and cognition. The authors explain that a student’s self-schema, or self-efficacy and perception of themselves and their abilities in academia , influence the student’s performance in a particular subject (116). For example, a student who has a positive self-schema regarding his intelligence, work ethic, or ability may perform better in academia than a student who has a negative self-schema. A student’s self-schema is also affected by the visualization of a particular goal and the recognition of “possible self” (116). That is, the student has knowledge about him or herself in the present and is also aware of “what [he or she] may become in the future” (116). This is to say that the student who has a goal to pursue a master’s degree in a particular subject may use the degree as a goal and, therefore, excel in classes that relate to the program of interest. This relates also to the idea of placing value on work that leads to the goal. A student’s goal, then, may influence him to access a particular positive or possible self-schema most often since his progress toward one goal relies on successful performance. Pintrich and Garcia use the example of a student who strives to enter medical school in order to become a doctor. The student with the “scientist possible self” will be more likely, then, to access this self-schema and will be more attentive to information that relates directly to the attainment of his or her goal to be a doctor, whereas a student whose goal might be to pursue a master’s in English might be less attentive to science-related information because it is not applicable to his or her “possible self” (117). This connects to Wardle’s findings about students’ unwillingness to put effort into assignments that seem as though they are too much work. That is, like the student who does not see the payoff of putting effort into a class that seems as though it will be too hard, students who perceive that writing will not be central to their goals will not place as high a value on writing and revision. As a result, students may not feel as motivated to perform well on written assignments that do not relate to their long-term goals and may, therefore, be unwilling to revise to the extent that their work requires in order for them to create an effective and coherent piece of work. To this end, research also supports the need for the students to develop effective methods of planning in regard to their writing that will help them work toward specific revision goals. Barry J. Zimmerman and Anastasia Kistantis remark that a student must first observe and then emulate the writing strategies of their superiors before they eventually adopt self-control or the ability to plan an argument and approach it effectively on their own (242). Finally, and ideally, a writer will find him or herself able to self-regulate, meaning that he or she will be able to successfully adapt his/her writing strategies to effectively communicate points to various audiences upon various topics (242). The researchers posit that students who perform poorly on revision tasks do not properly move between self-control or process-oriented writing, in which the primary focus is planning and structure, and self-regulation or outcome-oriented writing, in which the primary focus is improving the overall effectiveness of an argument. In their study of 84 high school girls who were asked to revise sentences using process-oriented and goal-oriented strategies, the researchers found that students who focused primarily on outcome-oriented goals (i.e. who would be reading the text and how effective would the text be for the audience) scored lowest and demonstrated the lowest-level writing performance. Similarly, those students who focused only on goal-oriented strategies (i.e. grammatical errors and word reorganization for clarity) scored at the intermediate writing level. Based on the highest-scoring group, the researchers concluded that students who are able to move successfully between self-control and self-regulation in writing are able to revise most effectively (Zimmerman & Kistantis 275). Of course, Zimmerman and Kistantis acknowledge that, in developing these strategies, students often benefit from outside comments from instructors (243). However, they neither discuss the types of commenting styles that are most effective in assisting students with revisions nor do they discuss the relationship that commenting might have to motivation. Like Zimmerman and Kistantis, Nancy Sommers feels that teacher comments are helpful in students’ process of revision. However, in Sommers’s view, teacher commenting often suffers from “rubber stamping” (“Responding to Student Writing” 126). That is, a teacher’s comments on one paper are not text specific and could be applied equally as well to a completely different paper because of the comments’ vagaries (126). This type of commenting points out to students that something might be wrong with the writing, but the comment does not explain well enough what the problem is. Thus, the student cannot revise his or her work effectively and likely cannot understand the nature of the problems that are being pointed out to him or her. Sommers suggests that teachers’ comments should be more comprehensive and less vague in order to point out problems in logic or smaller, sentence-level errors. She states that these comments should also recommend solutions or ask questions so that the student can engage more significantly in the revision process. Moreover, Sommers points out that teachers concentrate too much on sentence-level errors and word choice, often opting to eliminate a word from a sentence or changing several words rather than asking questions about the student’s intent or thinking about suggestions for the paragraph overall. Focusing too much on problems with diction “gives students an impression of the importance of these errors that is out of proportion” (124), making them focus on syntactical problems more than flaws in coherence and logic. For Sommers, commenting that does not stress the overall importance of the discourse makes writing seem as though it is a “series of parts” of which not one has its importance distinguished (125). Sommers explains that teachers must not treat the first draft of a student’s work as though it is the final draft, making significant changes to the grammar and structure of sentences when the entire sentence may be removed due to a logical error. In fact, concentrating on overall global-level problems in order to clarify the students’ ideas may ultimately help the student to recognize flawed logic that he or she can look for in continued revision (127). The result, as Sommers found in her analysis of students versus experienced writers, is that students equate the act of revision with “choosing better words” or using a thesaurus to “get rid of words that are bland and trite” (“Revision Strategies” 46) instead of focusing on making sure that their work is logical and coherent. Sommers’s belief that teachers must avoid the “rubber stamp” corrections that her own study revealed suggests that more specific comments that appeal to logical flaws or express reader confusion will help students to become more comfortable with answering and eventually anticipating questions the audience might have, allowing students to become more acclimated to the process of revision through incorporation and understanding of teacher comments. Chris Anson elaborates on this idea in his article “Response Styles and Ways of Knowing” in which he categorizes different types of commenting and their effects on students’ perceptions of teacher expectations. Anson names three styles of commenting that he observes professors use as they remark on students’ papers: dualistic, relativistic, and reflective. The dualistic model of commenting focuses mostly on grammar and syntax, hardly concentrating on global-level contents (344). The dualistic approach encourages an extremely black-and-white view, that is, an understanding that parts of writing are either right or wrong, and reinforces the point that syntactical errors hold greater weight than global level problems—a type of correction which Anson refers to as “error hunting” (349). On the other hand, relativistic commenters were characterized by their tendency to write a lengthy “note” to students at the end of the paper rather than make marginal comments on the work throughout. While the end notes were certainly more personal than dualistic commenters’ cursory remarks and offered more comprehensive suggestions for students’ revisions, Anson found that the “existence and purpose of the [students’] text[s] had faded from view (351). That is, the commenters may have asked questions that could theoretically relate to the text but which, ultimately, did not make any sense to anyone other than the commenter since they ignored particular problems that may have existed in the text or did not explicitly offer solutions. Finally, reflective commenters offered comprehensive remarks that focused more on global-level problems, but unlike the relativistic group, comments focused on “ideas, textual decisions, and personal reactions” (351), which ultimately aim to help students reason through the logic of their argument without overpowering the paper with the commenters’ ideas. This balance of commenting, Anson found, “challenged” students to “rethink and explore” their ideas, prompting them to become more focused on global level issues than on grammar and syntax (351). Ultimately, concludes Anson, reflective commenting prompts students to discuss their work more, causing them to work through problems in writing and to approach revision more proactively (338). However, like Zimmerman and Kisantis, neither Anson nor Sommers devotes enough attention to the role of commenting in creating motivation for students to revise their work carefully when, in fact, motivation seems to be primary in getting students more involved in their revision processes. This gap in research begs the question of what factors, in particular, motivate students to seek writing center tutoring for their college writing projects and, moreover, what types of commenting interventions are the most effective types of motivators for students as they revise their papers? In order to more comprehensively evaluate students’ performances on tasks, it is crucial to explore the connection between motivation and commenting and their combined influence on student revision. |