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)