10.2 Practice designing research questions and research projects

On Thursday last week we went over Robin Martin's essay as a model for form.  Today we talked about it in terms of patterns for designing research.  As set up in her introduction, Martin's essay asks the question: how does the form and content of teacher's written comments on student papers affect whether and how they revise their papers.  She uses codes and categories from an earlier study done by Ferris. [ I passed out a copy of her codes for features of comments - and for deciding whether/what kind of revisions students made to their papers; this information is also available in Appendices A & B in her paper.]

After discussing her system for coding comments - we put together a list of features/kinds of comments that students liked and disliked.  These lists from the board are reproduced here.

Helpful comments

on flow - to help develop movement

on organization  - to help plan overall arrangmente

clarity (to help know what needs to be there - if the point came across

point out if there is too much

connect to current ideas of what writing is

help with formal conventions

experessions of interest

encouragement

explanations

references

global suggestions

  

Hated comments

bigxes without explanation

unacceptable/you don't understand

very long comments

change => but not telling how

disagree + net getting something writer cares about

bloody paper

demanding different styles

As we created these lists, we started a conversation about what DIFFERENT kinds of questions researchers might ask about connections between students' development as writers - and the kinds of written comments teachers note on their papers. 

Some possible questions researchers might ask in clude:

• what is the role of positive comments (comments that don't request change) in student response?
• how does the directness of the comment affect whether /how students revise?  do different students need different levels of directness (groups should discuss the different questions among themselves)
• how (or do) comments build a relationship to the instructor? does this relationship influence whether or how students revise their paper?
• can comments increase students' engagement with their work?  what kinds of comments contribute to increased engagement?
• what is the cut off between feeling like the teacher is committed to helping the writer - and feeling overwhelmed?  what kinds of comments contribute the most to feeling overwhelmed? how much of feeling overwhelmed is about the students' situations - and not the commenting? 
• how do negative coments affect willingness to advise?
• differences between talk and written comments
• why do teachers make "demanding" comment
• role of positive comments - can too many comments have a negative effect?
• what are the effects of harsh comments connect to teacher expectations
• which comments (what kinds of comments?  what are their features?) do students tend to take personally - and is that good or bad?
• what kind of comments (or what features of comments) hurt student relationships to writing - why?
• what features of negative comments allow them to help (or not) writers to grow as writers/improve their writing?
• how do the writer's need shape the kind of comments a teacher should give?

Some of these questions still need some work before they would be a useful basis for a research project - but they all raise interesting ideas/problems.

After we talked over the questions and how we might turn them into useful research questions (questions that direct the researcher to the kind of data they will need + the features of the data they may need to attend to) - you worked in small groups to design a question and a project focused on comments on the sample essays with comments posted to the right.  

Groups: Josh, Corinne;  Andrea, Generra, Shana;  Valerie, Brigit, Tshandi;  Sara, Liana, Rachel

In your groups you worked to:

1. Review the data (the sample essays with comments)

2. Form a research question with respect to the comments/student's reception/features of the writing context/ comments effectiveness etc

3. Code the data (the comments)

4. Gather and analyze (code) data from your group with regard to how the features of the comments you are studying "work" or what they "do" (your responses to them).  You may find that different group members have different responses - if that is the case try to name the features/factors that account for the differences in response.

5. Identify some patterns with respect to your question - and begin to develop some explanations for why/how the patterns work.

Blog 9:  Post your group's work on the task outlined above (points 1-5) so far.

In class on Thursday, you will apply your "theory" to a larger data set by looking at more comments from papers, collecting more data  (from classmates) - and seeing how well the patterns + explanations you came up with work on a larger data set.