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Author: Iris

Seeing Patterns in Student Work

Published by Iris on Friday, June 20th, 2008

One of the aspects of expertise that fascinates me the most is the experts’ ability to look at a whole range of information and see useful patterns.* While reading the sophomore writing portfolios this week, I was constantly impressed by the way expert readers could, with incredible speed, read a student’s portfolio and say, “Well, this student has trouble framing quotations.” It was true, but it was a pattern that a novice reader might miss amidst all the details. The student had in various places also misused commas, or strung together paragraphs that didn’t seem entirely related, or had weak introductory sentences, or split infinitives, or had difficulty with tense or number agreement within sentences, or been uncomfortable choosing between primary pronouns (I/you/he/one… so many options!). And yet, an expert reader could take a broader view and say that over the course of all the papers submitted, this student had trouble framing quotations.

Musing on the facility with which these expert readers culled through details to find patterns, I realized that over the course of three years, I’ve begun to develop a similar capacity when faced with the student research experience. I could read a set of research papers and see that the student didn’t understand the concept of authoritative sources, or the conventions of scholarly disagreement, or how to deal with more than one or two secondary sources. And I know my colleagues and I often observe trends in the questions we get from students in specific classes. In fact, we often use these observations when we plan repeat support for a class or when we’re strategizing with the professors about how best to help the next batch of students.

Now I wish even more than I did before that I had time to comb back through all the notes I keep on all the appointments I have with students. I bet my instruction would improve dramatically if I had a better sense of the patterns of student confusion I see. And I bet the faculty I work with would appreciate it if I could communicate these trends to them in a less haphazard way than I am currently.

* For more on how experts differ from novices, see the chapter called “How Experts Differ from Novices” in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Eds. John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown and Rodney R. Cocking. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. 31-50.

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Most Likely Poisoned

Published by Iris on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

As some of you know, I’m allergic to eggs. I’m even allergic to the smell of cooking eggs. I’m allergic to stuff you cook in a pan that you’ve previously cooked eggs in. This is why I never accept breakfast invitations at conferences.

Well, this morning there were eggs EVERYWHERE at the portfolio reading. They had scrambled eggs available all morning. They served egg salad for lunch. They also served chicken salad for lunch, which is loaded with egg-y mayonnaise. So yeah, I’m pretty much doomed. Here come four days of dyslexia, headaches, and mood swings. Yippee.

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Anniversary

Published by Iris on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

I forgot about this yesterday, but that was my 3-year anniversary here at Carleton. By no coincidence whatsoever, it was also the 3-year anniversary of the day I started considering myself a librarian.

When I originally took this job, I secretly promised myself I could have another job after I’d stayed here for four years. I was terrified and lonely and felt under-qualified, but I knew I could stick almost anything out for four years. After all, college had been scary, but I’d made it through. Grad school had been scary, but four years later I’d finished a couple degrees. My secret plans have been foiled, though, because the people here are so great and the stuff I get to do here is so amazing that I’ve decided four years isn’t nearly enough. So if they’ll have me, I’d like to stay for a few more, please.

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Reading Sophomore Portfolios

Published by Iris on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

This morning was the first of three that I’ll spend sitting in a room with 35 or so faculty members reading portfolio after portfolio.* Or rather, the faculty read through portfolio after portfolio while I gave up on ever reading that quickly and just got through as many as I could. And now my legs are sore from being tense all morning…. nerves and all. It’s rather intimidating to join a group of faculty and participate as a novice in an activity they do all the time, and to know that every portfolio you read will be read again by one of them, and to wonder how you can possibly say something constructive to a student in a couple of sentences especially when you’re struggling to come up with a cohesive sense of why you think they should pass or not, and to sit there wishing you’d brought a dictionary because spelling just isn’t your thing and there’s no spell-check built into these pens and sheets of paper and you’re critiquing writing, for goodness sake, so the students are likely to be really ticked off if the person evaluating their writing can’t even spell…

And so, my legs are sore.

So why did I volunteer for this? I mean, I’d done it once before. I knew I’d sit there with pen poised over the blue evaluation form and dread having to write to the student who’s academic career will be shaped in some small part by what I write. I knew I’d read at half the speed of my fellow portfolio readers. I knew all these things, but I also knew that if I chickened out, I’d kick myself. This is, after all, one of the only times I get to see the results of the work I do with students. Even more than that, it’s one of the only ways I’d ever get to read enough of my students’ work to get a sense of the patterns of successes and failures in underclassmen’s writing, use of outside sources, and argument structure. It’s also a rare opportunity to learn about faculty standards as they’re applying those standards. And you know, it’s a beautiful thing to watch experts glance over a random sample of writing and pull out patterns of writing indicative of the student’s writing ability over all.

So, as we all sat there norming our reading by evaluating some sample portfolios as a group, I also began the process of recalibrating my expectations for student work at the Sophomore level and listening for clues about what might be expected at the Junior level. For example, I learned again what a difficult project it is for college students to learn what a conclusion really is in a paper, and how to manage it effectively. I saw students learning to negotiate tone and voice and just how, exactly, to manage other people’s words in with your own.

And so I’ll be going back tomorrow and the next day as we plow through another 400 or so portfolios together. I’m not looking forward to the aching legs by the end of the week, but I am looking forward to coming through the experience with a better sense of what students can do by their second year in college. As I said to one of my co-workers, I hate reading the portfolios, but once I’m finished I love having done it.

* More info on the portfolio.

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