Rough Draft of Research Paper

GRADES -- a letter, number, or other symbol indicating the relative quality of a student's work in a course, examination, or special assignment (http://www.dictionary.com/)

It is a six-letter word that motivates almost all college students, including myself, to give up their Saturdays to study or wait until the next day to pull an all-nighter. Students put in the extra effort to make sure that the good ol' GPA leans more towards a 4.0 than down the scale in the opposite direction. That six-letter word is what also motivates students to give up their personal time in order to visit the writing center to "fix" their paper. As much as writing center staff members try to avoid the subject of the six-letter word, let's face it - grades are what keep the writing center in business.

More often than not, students seek the help of writing center tutors because they want to make the necessary changes to their work in order to improve their grades. Based on the literature, staff members at the writing center "try their best to avoid the subject" (Morrison) though that is nearly impossible to do. Grades are what bring students to the writing center in the first place and it is the single-most important factor that connects the tutor with the person that first enters into the cubicle.

Students who go to the writing center expect accurate feedback from the tutor and so they subject themselves and their work to another's criticisms.

In coming to a writing center for assistance, students must explain to a tutor
what they want and what they hope to acheive. In the course of this type of
interaction, the students make themselves vulnerable in opening themselves up to
understanding or misunderstanding, judgment or acceptance, approval or
disapproval. (Murphy, 298)

Because staff members at the writing center are fully aware of this, tutors must guard their actions so as not to offend or discourage the student from writing. It is the tutor's job to create an [environment/atmosphere...another word, anyone?!] wherein the student does not feel threatened nor intimidated. The writing center must be a place for talk, where students are encourged to engage "in conversation at as many points in the writing process as possible" (Truesdell).

[reword all this mumbo jumbo! == Through the course of this semester, I wanted to find out how a tutor's remarks affected a student's reaction. Through my findings, I wanted to know/come to a better understanding of the real meaning of constructive criticism within the realm of the writing center....I wanted to see how a tutor's verbal and nonverbal actions affected the student's perception of the tutoring session. --> The purpose of this research is to define and measure what constructive criticism is. In other words, I will conduct research to see what tutors say and how students receive it and react to it. ]

I observed tutoring sessions conducted in the Writing Center and rated the tutor's verbal and nonverbal actions in comparision to Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson's Politeness Theory. These actions were coorelated with either the directive or non-directive (minimalist) tutoring techniques. My strategy for taking notes during these observations was to write down what the tutor and students were saying verbatim and I analyzed everthing once the sessions were over in terms of the two variables. One way I measured a student's satisfaction was through their body language or verbal cues (ex: nodding, smiling, saying yes, etc.). I also asked the students to fill out the Student Feedback form to see if my observations of student satisfaction corresponded with what the student felt was a "good/another word please" session.

[describe the Politeness Scale (bald-on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness) & Directive/Non-directive Tutoring Techniques]

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=d7d78sg_0c7c333fq&hl=en

Blog #16 - Research Plan

Statement of Purpose
How does a tutor's remarks affect a student and how will the student react to it? Through these findings, what then is the definition of constructive criticism and how can that be measured?

Detailed Statement of Research Questions
I will observe tutoring session in the CAS writing center and rate tutor's various actions in comparison to Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson's Politeness Theory which can be found in Nash's essay. These findings will be in correlation with either the directive or nondirective (minimalistic) tutoring techniques. My strategy for taking notes during these observations is to write down what the tutor and student is saying verbatim. I will analyze everything once the sessions are over in terms of the politness scale and directive/nondirective tutoring techniques. Once way I can measure a student's satisfaction is through their body language or verbal cues (ex: nodding, saying yes, smiling, etc.). I will also use the Student Feedback form to see if students were satisfied or unsatisfied with the tutoring session. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to define and measure what constructive criticism is. In other words, I will conduct research to see what tutors say and how students receive it and react to it.

Information Gathered
I have yet to observe tutoring session in the CAS but based on the information that I found in my research, constructive criticism is considered good when given by teachers and it is written down on students' papers. Some students use this to improve their writing, while others take offence. This constructive criticism in turn discourages the student from writing, causing them to dislike it all together.

Plan for Gathering Information
For this project, I started with a broad collection of data and narrowed down the sources to the ones that are of importance to my topic of choice. From this broad list of sources, I have created my annotated bibliography. I will coode the notes that I have taken from these sources as well as notes that I will take from observations done in the CAS tutoring sessions. Another way I will collect data is through the Student Feedback forms which the students will fill out after observing their tutoring session with another tutor. I will also conduct tutoring sessions myself and take notes of these session as well. I will review these notes and organize them into a preliminary draft. I will go back and form, looking through my notes and observations, to create my final paper.

Blog #15 - Tutoring Observations

Post Blog 15 after you observe a session.

** I still have yet to observe a tutoring session and write this blog.

Blog #14 - Questions Regarding Research Project

I'm looking at the Google.Doc page with everyone's resources and there's so much there that it looks confusing! I just started adding my sources and I don't think I did it right :( I feel so behind because I only have 4 sources, 2 from the internet and 2 from the Longman Guide. I know what I need to research but the Writing Center Research Project page isn't helping at all. Whenever I type in something for the search, nothing really comes up. So my question is, can I use Google Scholar to look up some sources?

I still don't know what my research question is because I don't know if I'm looking for the right things. I have a lot of questions (as can be see on my Developing a Research Plan doc) but I still need to tweek it a little bit...or a lot!

So right now, I don't really have that many questions. I just need to narrow down my choice of what I really need to research and look for in my observations.

Blog #13 - "Real" First 5 Minutes

I have noticed that the "real" first 5 minutes that I've observed are very similar to what Newkirk labeled as an "ideal" way of conducting a writing conference. Because the past tutoring sessions that I've observed were among my classmates, there is no need to introduce ourselves to one another. We are comfortable working with one another that it's easy for us to voice our thoughts to the tutor and visa versa.

Newkirk believes that students should be given the opportunity to talk within the first few minutes of the conference. I have noticed this in the tutoring sessions that I've observed because the student is the first to explain why they are there and what they need help on. Because most of the tutors used minimalist techniques, there was no problem seeing the student take control of the session. The tutor asked questions that guided the student to understand the purpose/focus of the paper.

I think that my fellow classmates are doing a good job in tutoring their students because I've observed what Newkirk labeled as the "ideal" writing conference. I guess we're learning a lot during class (and from one another!) that it's hard to mess up and conduct a tutoring session like the first two examples in Newkirk's essay that "didn't work".

Blog #12 - CAS Tutoring Session

During our first tutoring session in the CAS Writing Center, none of us had students signed up to see us :( I guess that was okay because we got practice observing our classmates tutor in action. I've got to admit that it was a little chaotic at first seeing that it was only our first day there, but I'm glad we were able to get our feet wet, so to speak. I can't wait until next Monday when, hopefully, a real live student will come seeking for our help and guidance!

I was given the opportunity to observe two of my fellow classmates during our time there. I think it's safe to mention their names here since it was only practice but I don't want to risk it. I'll just say that I observed Kris (tutor) and Sarah (student) - real names have been altered. During my observation, I noticed that Kris used minimalistic techniques which seemed very effective for this session. He sat next to Sarah and only spoke when she needed ideas or had a question. Sarah had a pen in her hand and wrote on the paper while Kris sat there and watched her do the work. Sarah read the paper out loud so that the both of them could analyze and work on it together. There was not a lot of eye contact going on between them because most of the time was spent looking down at the paper. Whenever Sarah would explain something, she would talk with her hands moving around from side to side, which to many of us (including myself) is natural. Kris' comments were always positive and the session wasn't that long because Sarah only needed help with a small portion of her paper. I'm sure some of the tutoring sessions we will observe in the CAS will go like this because the students just want to go in to get help and leave. However, the student felt that she got the help that she needed so I'm guessing that that's all that matters.

Since the session was shorter than expected, Dr. Chandler decided to demonstrate how to tutor a student, so she tutored Sarah again. This time, I saw a great difference between her tutoring style and Kris'. The tutor did a lot of nodding and was very encouraging. Whenever the student would say something that contributed to the thesis statement, she would say, "Good. Now write that down." Whenever the student would say something about the paper, the tutor would restate it in the form of a question to make sure that she understood it and the information that was relayed to her by the student was correct. There was more eye contact that occured during this session than the first and again, positive feedback was given to the student - example, "That's a great title!"

At the end of the hour, I wasn't sure if I took the right notes and observed the proper elements of a tutoring session. I guess I didn't know if this would help me for my research paper, but since I'm not sure what I'm going to do for it, the notes were good enough. Unexperienced as we are at this point in time, we just need to go in with an open mind and see how it is. This is a learning process and I can't wait to see what will turn up next :)

Blog #11 - Possible Ideas for a Project

Listed below are three possible ideas for my research project:

1) During our class discussion on Wednesday, we talked about assumptions on how tutoring sessions in the CAS will be conducted. One assumption I came up with was on constructive criticism and how a student handles it. Face it...none of us want to be criticized but sometimes it needs to be done in order for us to learn and grow. It would be interesting to find out when students take offense when they are given constructive criticism about their writing. Will they take it personally and become offending by what the tutor has to say? Will they become defensive and feel that the tutor's words about their writing is an actual reflection of the person that they are? How and to what extent will the students express their offense, maybe through their words or body language? Will some appreciate the constructive criticism and use it to better their paper? How do men vs. women handle constructive criticism? These are but a few questions I have in mind for this topic and I'm really interested to find out more!

2) During one of our discussions in class, we talked about how people learn. Some examples of these are by memorization, repeating something in order to "get it", creating mnemonic devices, etc. It would be interesting to see what kind of learning styles are most popular with the students at Kean. Are the majority of us visual learners or do we need someone to break it down for us in order for us to "get it"? This in my opinion would be a good research topic but then you have to take into account what works for the tutor because most likely, that'll be the first strategy they will use to relay the message to the student. I guess more observation on body language and verbal exchanges will have to be focused more here.

3) I mentioned in my previous blog that it would be interesting to conduct research on effective techniques that will get younger students to want to learn and become better writers. Since our job as tutors is not to create better writing, I want to at least find out how to engage them long enough so that they at least care about it.

Looking at all three possible ideas, I'm leaning more towards #1. Why? I'm not quite sure...I guess we're going to have to wait and see :o)