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Nov. 15th, 2010 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
infryqVia Making Light: Paper Mills, and the inability of college grads to form a coherent sentence.
http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/
Reading articles like these makes me ponder ways to counter. If paper mills are plausible because we grade results and not skills, how can an educator arrange grade what she actually wants to measure? How can we address students whose writing abilities are sorely lacking? How can we give ESL students the practice and exposure they (sometimes desperately) need? Some thoughts.
http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/
Reading articles like these makes me ponder ways to counter. If paper mills are plausible because we grade results and not skills, how can an educator arrange grade what she actually wants to measure? How can we address students whose writing abilities are sorely lacking? How can we give ESL students the practice and exposure they (sometimes desperately) need? Some thoughts.
- Don't grade the 10-page research paper. Or, rather, mark the essay, but call it "training" and have it count for only 10-40% of the course grade. Instead, grade a "debrief" essay written in class, on the same topic, or on a subtopic covered in the larger paper, or critiquing their original essay.
- Do a 20-minute in-class essay on *something* every week.
- During research papers, write me a 20-minute in-class on the research you did for your paper this week, or the edits you made, or the theses you considered. This accomplishes two things: (1) students without writing experience, get some; (2) even if they're having their research paper ghost-written, they have to learn enough to write competently about their topic anyhow, even if it's only in short bursts. If people memorize 20 minutes' worth of essay to write out verbatim every week, I think I'm okay with that, too.
- Recycle student content as editing training, whether as part of lecture or as a stand-in for in-class original content. Lots easier to grade than an essay. Teaches people how to improve arbitrary bad writing, so they can apply the same skills to their own work. Might be particularly effective, because a lot of ESL students I know can read English well enough for research but are crap at writing it. Maybe they can't distinguish things like word order and tense and plurality and spelling and are just working out the meaning of sentences from context? So it's no surprise the examples in the article read like a bag of words. "Critical" reading, reading with the intention of catching errors, is something I think is passed over a lot when you learn a new language, but is crucial for fluent writing.
