It’s a brand new term (well, sort, of it’s actually the third week of it now!), the second of our four terms here at the college, and today (Monday 21st January, though I won’t be able to publish this post on the same day!) we managed our first scholarship circle session of the term.

For more information about what scholarship circles involve, please look here and for write-ups of previous scholarship circles, here

You might also be interested in session 1 / session 2 / session 3 and 4 / session 5-8 / session 9 of this particular circle.

The biggest challenge we faced was remembering where we had got to in the final session BC (Before Christmas!). What were our research questions that we had decided on again? Do we still like them? What was the next step we were supposed to take this term?

Who?

We talked again about which students we wanted to participate – did we want IFY (Foundation) or PMP (Pre-Masters)? We considered the fact that it’s not only linguistic ability which influences response to feedback (our focus) – things like age, study pathway, past learning experiences and educational culture in country of origin will all play their part. Eventually, we decided to focus on IFY students with PMPs their coursework may alter dramatically between first and final draft submissions due to feedback from their content tutor, which would affect our ability to do text analysis regarding their response to our first draft feedback. Within the IFY cohort we have decided to focus on the c and d level groups (which are the two bottom sets, if you will), as these students are most at risk of not progressing so any data which enables us to refine the feedback we give them and others like them will be valuable.

What?

It is notoriously tricky to pin down a specific focus and design a tool which enables you to collect data that will provide the information you need in order to address that focus. Last term, we identified two research questions:

This session, we decided that this was actually too big and have decided to focus on no. 2. Of course having made that decision, and, in fact, also in the process of making that decision, we discussed what specifically to focus on. Here are some of the ideas:

• Recognition – which of the Quickmarks are students able to recognise and identify without further help/guidance?
• Process – are they using the Quickmarks as intended? (When they don’t recognise one, do they use the guidance provided with it, that appears when you click on the symbol? If they do that, do they use the links provided within that information to further inform themselves and equip themselves to address the issue? You may assume students know what the symbols mean/read the information if they don’t but anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise – e.g. a student who was given a wrong word class symbol and changed the word to a different word rather than changing the class of it!)
• Application – do they go on to be able to correct other instances of the error in their work?

Despite our interest in the potential responses, we shelved the following lines of enquiry for the time being:

• How long do they spend altogether looking at their feedback?
• How do they split that time between Quickmarks, general comments and copy-pasted criteria?

We are mindful that we only have 6 weeks of sessions this term (and that included this one!) as this term’s week 10, unlike the final week of last term, is going to be, er, a tad busy! (An extra cohort and 4 exams being done between them vs one cohort and one exam last time round!) As we want to collect data next term, that gives us limited time for preparation.

How?

We are going to collect data in two ways.

Text analysis

We each will look at a first draft and a final essay draft of a different student and do a text analysis to find out if they have applied the Quickmark feedback to the rest of their text. This will involve picking a couple of Quickmarks that have been given to the student in their first draft, identifying and highlighting any other instances of that error type, and then looking at the final draft in order to find the highlighted errors so that we can see if they have been corrected, and if they have, how – successfully or not.

We are going to have a go at this in our session next week, to practise what we will need to do and agree on the process.

Questionnaire

Designing an effective questionnaire is very difficult and we are still in the very early stages. We are still leaning towards Google Forms as the medium. Key things we need to keep in mind are:

• How many questions can we realistically expect students to answer? The answer is probably fewer than we think, and this means that we have to be selective in what questions to include.
• How can we ask the questions most clearly? As well as using graded language, this means thinking about question types – will we use a Likert scale? will we use tick boxes? will we use any open questions?
• How can we ensure that the questions generate useful, relevant data? The data needs to answer the research questions. Again, this requires considering different question types and what sort of data they will yield. Additionally, knowing that we need to analyse all the data that we collect, in terms of our research question, we might want to avoid open questions as that data will be more difficult and time-consuming to analyse, interesting though it might be.

The questions will obviously relate to the focuses we identified, earlier discussed – recognition, process and application. One of our jobs for the next couple of sessions is to write our questions. It’s easy (ish!) to talk around what we want to know, but writing clear questions that elicit that information will be significantly more challenging!

Another thing we acknowledged, finally, is that research-wise we are not doing anything new that hasn’t been done before, BUT the “newness” comes from doing it in our particular context. And that is absolutely fine! 🙂

Homework: 

Well those of us who haven’t got round to doing the reading set at the end of the previous session (cough cough) will hopefully manage to finish that. (That was Goldstein, L. Questions and answers about teacher written commetary and student revision: teachers and students working together in Journal of Second Language Writing and Ene, E & Upton, T.A. Learner uptake of teacher electronic feedback in ESL composition.) Otherwise, thinking about possible questions and how to formulate them!