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.