CCE

The nonargumentative research paper

After six years of struggling with the research paper requirement for Comp 1 (conventional topics, paragraphs patchworked to incoherence), I'm trying a new approach, inspired by the format of Harper's Annotation section. (Here's an example that's freely available--there are many with more accessible subject matter, but you can see the basic layout: an image or visual artifact of some sort surrounded by discrete text boxes, aka paragraphs, filled with researched info.)

The traditional argumentative research paper (esp. as a first research assignment), I'm hypothesizing, is much too complex, so I'm separating out argument from research in a developmental sequence that goes something like this (a work in progress this semester still):

• I had students first write a personal essay (btw, if you haven't seen it already, check out Clancy's list of reasons for giving for such an assignment) and then an ethnography.
• Essay 3 is an argument based on personal experience and observation (arguing against the conventional view of an object, activity, abstraction), focusing on clear statement of thesis and cookie-cutterish development pattern of series of reasons each developed into paragraph.
• The Annotation assignment (I encouraged students to select images that tied to their personal interests) will focus on formulating research questions, finding sources, and integrating info into coherent paragraphs (without having to sustain at the same time the thread of an argument). Paragraph coherence seems to vanish with the argumentative research paper, so I'm hoping the emphasis on paragraphing with these discrete sub-topics will help.
• For the last essay I plan to give pairs of articles that present opposing views (so that I have control of topics, to avoid the too-familiar) and ask students to do a text-wrestling synthesis, with a somewhat scaled down amt. of research to try to reconcile contradictions of fact.

Question(s): What nonargumentative research projects have you used, and how do you think they support students' cognitive development?

Why the annotated bib?

While we're on the subject of the research paper/process, (if you haven't seen it already) go read Derek's post on the purpose and function of annotated bib, or, as he puts it, "how to (also whether to) reconcile rigor with pleasure in the processes of collection and annotation." It's a thought-provoking few paragraphs.

To ease into this thinking-stuff, I started the same way my students do, with a google search; UNC-Chapel Hill's page was the most complete description of the standard assignment that I could find in a few minutes' search. I've been trying to tease apart the problematic issues Derek identifies:

How does the A. B. fit into the research paper assignment? Derek here, in a comment:

So I like the side of the annotated bib that is about urging students to be more fully cognizant of productive ways of handling sources, the wide range of possible materials they might bring aboard, and so on. Yet it seems like--all the same--the annotated bib can become this tame aside, something that domesticates the research rather than breathing life into it (which is, ideally, one of the things it might do.)

Can the A. B. assignment be used to stimulate rather than deaden student interest? How does topic choice figure in here? I'm not at all convinced that allowing the student free choice of topic will lead to the "passionate, geeky collector" Derek envisions nor that instructor-assigned topics will preclude the development of such enlivened curiosity. When allowed free (sort of) choice of topic, many of my students still gravitate towards the conventional issues that even they are not truly interested in, whereas I think I have (on occasion) managed to suggest research questions that do end up engaging students (in much the same way that a teacher might suggest a book that ends up appealing to a reluctant reader). Certainly, though, the fostering of such curiosity is a central part of what we should be doing, or trying to do. (Not always an easy task, like trying to foster a love of butterfly collecting in a student who doesn't much like the outdoors, as I was reminded the other day in an after-class conversation with a student who readily admitted that he didn't much like to read).

How should this A. B. be assessed? I'll give a few links to rubrics here (while I continue to incubate my reservations-about-rubics post-to-come): here's one from Rebecca Martin of Clark College and here an interesting article about the A. B. in an undergraduate biology course (rubric via supplementary material link).

So I have been thinking about  why I have used the A. B. assignment. I don't use it every semester, but I did last semester, as a group project in which 3 or 4 students  posted onto a wiki Internet or database sources (as links) along with several-sentence summaries and evaluations. (Students then wrote analytical papers, looking at the sources of disagreement over an issue, using the sources found by their own or another group.) I guess I would say that my purposes in using A. B.s are to foreground the locating and evaluating of sources and to give students much-needed practice in picking out the main position taken by an author.

This semester I'm trying a different sort of annotation in service of the research paper (details to come).

More on working with sources

The comments on the previous post, particularly AcadeMama's mention of annotation and synthesis exercises, have set me thinking again about how complicated these skills are and how they might be best taught. I'm afraid I've been guilty of doing too much talking about some of these skills, then letting students go off on some too-large research project rather than setting up exercises for my students to build these skills more incrementally. In past semesters, before assigning the traditional argumentative research paper, I have used a progression of assignments:

• paragraph summaries of three or four page articles
• a text-wrestling essay (to borrow UMass-Amherst's approach) that summarizes and responds to an article of about a dozen pages or so
• an assignment analyzing the differences in two contradictory articles

but I am thinking now that many more shorter assignments might work better. Here are some of the things I've been trying out and other ideas I've been considering.

• I think my students need lots more practice differentiating between claims, evidence, and analysis. (Newsweek's one-page columns come to mind here as possibilities, or newspaper editorials; the first part of D. Q. McInerny's Being Logical seems as if it might be useful as well, if I'm remembering it accurately.)
• They also need loads of practice with summarizing, paraphrasing, and selecting quotations (a trio I find  myself writing on the board over and over again, time better spent in making them do it). Here we run up against (some) students' difficulties with reading, a subject I've written about earlier. I started in with this last week, using for fodder the nonfiction book my students are reading this semester, Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map. I've been doing the selecting myself, of difficult sentences for them to paraphrase and paragraphs to summarize and select quotable quotes; when they get to the point of handling sources more independently, here's a handy guide from the University of Houston that explains when to do which.
• Evaluating sources is another problem area. Some of my colleagues prohibit the use of web sites, insisting students use research databases to try to reduce/avoid this problem; my position is, rather, that the Internet is a rich source of research info that students need to be able to access effectively. But as many times as I try to explain relevance, authority ("who is the author? how do you know he/she is an expert?"), bias, and currency, my students still, over and over again, try to use anonymous sources or commercial sites or (horrors!) even blogs. My idea this semester: Up to this point my students have been using blogs for daily journaling based on a prompt word or picture. I think I'll try giving them a daily subject or question, have them do a quick Internet search, then post a link to the best site/article they can find in 5 or 10 minutes (maybe also posting a comment to evaluate another student's source?).
• Yet another stumbling block is the integration of sources, actually using this information in the service of some larger or different point. (Here's where we get those ragtag patchwork attempts, or the ones with a train of thought so choppy you--or should I say I?--can't read more than a paragraph at a shot.) In trying to teach students how to integrate sources, though, I think my focus is too often misplaced on the mechanical, on using signal phrases and inserting in-text citations rather than on how to discover and make explicit the meaning relationships between bits of information. Often I see students who don't seem to have thought through which piece of evidence supports which claim, which two claims or pieces of evidence contradict each other, or, more generally, how the bits fit into the structure of the whole. Again I find I spend too much time talking them through the process, in the abstract, rather than actually doing it. In the collection of online handouts that accompany his Writing at the Threshold, Larry Weinstein provides a model for a useful sort of exercise: arrange this set of student notecards into the skeleton of a coherent argument. I'd like to have several sets of information like this for students to manipulate. Some sort of mapping or color-coding might be a good thing to try as well.
• Finally, on a more "academic" level, another set of tools with (I think) great potential are the templates in Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say (the introductory chapter is available as a pdf); I was skeptical of the whole template-idea, but it's pitched at an approachable level that shows students in clear terms some beginning steps they can make to enter into conversation with texts.

Anybody got any other ideas?

Considering the writers' handbook

On the CHE-sponsored blog Brainstorm, Gina Barreca wrote recently about bad (with the comments here containing many positive recommendations), good, and the best books about writing, which set me to thinking about the writers' handbook often required for FYC classes. A little cost/benefit analysis is in order here, I think: in particular,

• how much are these manuals costing our students?
• what material are we as instructors expecting students to find in these manuals?
• how much are these manuals actually used by students?

Textbook publishers often don't make it easy to find list prices of these books (maybe because the cost doesn't matter to instructors requesting their free desk copies?), but a quick bit of research on the website of one leading publisher shows prices as high as $70! The concise editions that have started to proliferate do provide a more reasonable option, but it's still worth thinking about why and how we expect students to use these supplements.

Now, I haven't studied these books exhaustively, but at first/second/third glances most appear nearly indistinguishable (spriral-bound, tabbed, an "innovative" chapter on visual rhetoric, research chapters tucked non-threateningly at the back). The three main content areas seem to be grammar/usage tuneups, style matters, and the research process. Can our students get this info elsewhere, more completely, more engagingly delivered, more reasonably priced?

From the Internet we have (free) online resources such as Purdue's OWL, the Capital Community College Foundation's Guide to Grammar and Writing, Bedford-St. Martin's Re: Writing, Chuck Guilford's Paradigm Online Writing Assistant, the elegant clarity of Punctuation Made Simple, and the attention-getting (maybe) Grammar Bytes. Also, if you haven't seen it yet, you may want to check out the Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook (if there's something you don't agree with, change it; if you think something is missing, add it). (Many of these online resources include an interactive component as well as explanatory material and multiple examples.)

Mass-market options (most at $15 or less) include Michael Harvey's The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing ($6.95 from Amazon!!; also available here in an online version): Constance Hale's lively Sin and Syntax; and, of course, the classic Elements of Style, most recently released in a gorgeous, cleverly illustrated version (see the illustrator Maira Kalman's site for a taste via video; for the more conservative, the original Strunk text is available here).

For the research process, check out Steven Krause's The Process of Research Writing, offered via Creative Commons licensing. As for MLA citation, do you really expect our students to see the value of remembering all those details when they have available such options as Citation Machine, EasyBib, NoodleBib, and (if yr institution ponies up the fee) RefWorks? (And is it really all about where we put those colons and what we set italic??)

The main issue for me comes down to how (if at all) students will use (any of) these resources. After relying on electronic sources for a while, I thought that students might be more likely to consult a book than a website, so I did require one of those generic handbooks a few semesters ago. Maybe it  comes down more to how the instructor uses the reference rather than the mode of delivery? But in my more cynical moments I wonder if it's  just a romantic delusion to think that a FYC student will take the time to look (in either book or website) to find out whether an indefinite pronoun takes a singular or plural verb (to reveal one of my own grammatical insecurities).

Questions: What's the value in writers' manuals? Which one(s) do you prefer, and/or what are yr criteria for selection? How do you encourage yr students to actually use these books?

 

A hot topic

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes word of Doug Campbell and Denis Dutton's new website on global warming. It looks like a rich source of material for a themed course on the subject, but I'm more interested in its potential as a template for an informational website on a controversial issue. Maybe a good group project in a composition class??

Thinking Academic Thoughts in a Hotel In Branford

Before I head off to create a picture show of our new house for my in-laws, I want to post these two questions about blogging (I'd point out how "blog" rhymes with "nog," but I want to be serious, so I won't.)

1.  Has anyone done any research on how blogs are used in other disciplines --  like math, science, theatre, dance, etc......?

2.  Has anyone done any research on non-academic uses of blogs--like fundraisers, informational blogs, shop blogs, travel blogs, etc........?

I'm very curious about this since I have been keeping a personal blog and also have used blogs in workshops on blogging, on genealogical research, on fundraising for Katrina clean-up.  I'm thinking about expanding "Sister Dysthemia Suggests" into her own blog about "living with depression when you're the landlord."  And I'd love to see what people are doing in and outside of academe.

Liz Hijacks us For a Worthy Cause

The following was originally a comment, but I think it's worthy of a post:

This is a bit of a comment hijack, but I thought I'd pass this along:

Julie Meloni, who writes No Fancy Name,

http://nofancyname.blogspot.com/2006/10/calling-all-rhetcomp-instructors-survey.html

Calling all rhet/comp instructors! survey of grading/response styles [grad student project]

I hereby call on the Academic Blogosphere to help out one of my fellow grad students. If you have taught composition at any type of college/university, as a grad student/adjunct/prof, for any length of time, my classmate would very much like to hear your thoughts on grading papers. She says:

My name is Michelle Perry and I am enrolled in a class at San Jose State University on Composition Theory. I have decided to write my final paper on the grading insights of people in the field of teaching composition. Many theories abound regarding the "correct" way to grade papers, but I am curious to see what people have to say about their own styles and successes. Thank you for your time in answering the questions. I appreciate your time and I look forward to your responses.

How to reply:
- anonymously/pseudonymously or not, doesn't matter
- you can leave your responses in a comment below and I'll forward them along OR
- you can email responses to me at jmeloni@email.sjsu.edu and I'll send them along OR
- you can email responses directly to her at mishperry@hotmail.com

Please spread the word, if you are so inclined, because I know all the rockstar rhet/comp people I read have no reason to come to my wee "life and everything" blog, although I do know I am two degrees of separation from them all through some of you who do hang out here.

Basically, I want Michelle to get some great responses, write an outstanding paper (she's very smart), win the research paper of the year award at our school, then win the CSU-wide research paper award, and then go on to great things. I'm not writing about anything nearly as interesting for my project in the same class.

On to the questions...

1. How many years have you been teaching?

2. During those years has your grading system or method changed? If so, how?

3. How would you describe your current grading/feedback system on composition papers? Comments? Grammar? Endnotes?

4. How many papers do you grade per semester on average?

5. How much time to you spend, on average, grading each paper? (If your time grading varies depending on the type of essay please provide examples)

6. Does your grading method on papers differ based on the type of essay presented? Descriptive vs. analytical or Final version vs. Draft? If so, how?

7. How do your students react to the type of grading/commentary you provide on their papers? (please provide specific examples if possible)

8. In your opinion, how does your grading process affect your student’s writing? Do you see improvements? Are these improvements consistent?

9. If you had more time and a lighter teaching load would you change your grading style? If so, how?

Posted by: Liz | October 07, 2006 at 07:38 PM

From The Four C's

Deb of Daily Practice went to the CCCC's and has posted her notes and observations about the huge, unfinished study of composition instruction at the turn of this century.  As she points out, the work of the researchers is not yet done, but what they are already finding out about who actually teaches comp is startling.