Blog 6

Our Group: Bri, Danielle J., Danielle B.

Question #5: How does the amount of text selected for side comments affect students’ responses?

Features of the comments:

Length (amount of text in words and lines)

Lines with no text that make the comments seem longer than they are

We can classify the side comments into  three categories based on length.

Brief comments are 1 or 2 lines long  and are approximately 5 to 17 words long.

Average comments are 3 to 4 lines long. In word count, they are approximately 18 to 31 words long.

Extensive comments are 5 lines or more, using at least 32 words.

The extensive comment (Comment ML8) with the most words and lines is in Data 4-2  with 9 lines, 69 words.

Features of student responses:

While we do not have access to the data which would contain the students’ responses, we can infer from our own experiences that there would be different levels of accuracy of “how right the student gets it.” How much does the student change where there was previously a comment?

Does the student change nothing at all?

Does the student make minor changes, like add some sentences for clarification or omit a few phrases?

Does the student make major changes, like completely add or delete a paragraph?

Observations from personal experience:

Brief comments sometimes may not be very specific and may not elicit a response from the student simply because the student is not sure what the teacher’s suggestion means.

Extensive comments are typically very specific in telling the writer exactly what needs to be done, but just looking at the amount of text can make students feel overwhelmed.

There is not always a direct relationship between amount of text in the comment and extent of the change. A brief comment may elicit no change, a minor change, or a major change as a response. For example, consider the comment, “I’m not sure I see the logical connections between these ideas. Can you clarify?” (Data Set 4-4, Comment ML8). What kind of change is made will depend on whatever the student decides is best. In most cases, from our experiences, a brief comment will only elicit a minor change. In the case of a brief comment that is purely positive and written to motivate the student, the student may not change anything at all.