The Concept of Control in Teacher Response (Straub) & Looking Back As We Look Forward (Yancey)

YetYet another powerful article about commenting on student’s paper. The tone of this article was a bit different from the others though. I thought this author had a lighter and almost humorous tone to his message. He began by saying that despite the expanded quote of our inquiry and deepen discussions that we have continue to look at responses in dualistic ways. He sates, “teacher commentary is either directive or facilitative, authoritative or collaborative, teacher-based or student-based.” In this article he tried to identify the focus and modes of comment styles labeled “directive” a controlling system and “facilitative” using the comments of known composition teachers. Straub begins by examining several teachers’ comments on students’ paper. Comparing these students’ papers he found that the teacher’s comments are highly controlling. Straub states, “The teacher, like an editor, freely marks up the writing-circling errors, underlining problem areas, and inserting corrections on the student's text.” He assert that the comments written on these student’s papers don’t tell the students what is wrong with their writing and what need to be change. Straub conclude that the more comment a teacher makes on student’s paper, the more controlling the teacher is likely to be. This applied more so to the teachers who make numerous specific comments on local matter. He also concluded that the more a teacher looks at student writing processes and tried to focus on the writer’s development and not the development of the specific text, the less likely the teacher is to point out specific changes in the text.

He went on to talk more about the different type of comments. For example he concluded that comments framed as corrections exert greater control over the student than criticism of the writing. He also added that praise comments are less controlling than criticism or commands because they place the teacher in the role of the appreciative reader.  However, they can decrease the teacher’s values and agenda and contain a certain degree of control over how the student views his/her own text and how she/ revises.

At the end Straub came to the conclusion that all l teacher’s comment regardless of their style or techniques are evaluative, but the question of how teachers exert their power over students still remain.

While reading this I had to pause a couple of time to make sure that I wasn’t rereading last week’s article “Writing Assessment in the 21^st Century, also by Yancey. It’s pretty much echo what she said in that previous article. In this article she also divides the history of writing assessment into three “waves.” The first wave (1950-1970) she states focused on objective, non-essay testing that prioritized “efficiency and reliability.” The second wave (1970-1986) which she claims moved towards holistic scoring of essays, based on rubrics and scoring guides first developed through ETS and AP. The third wave (1986-present) developed to include portfolios and larger, programmatic assessments. Yancey looks at these waves from several perspectives. One includes how the concepts of reliability and validity are viewed, the other is the local knowledge of the non-expert teacher. Again just like in the last article Yancey voices her concerns for the state of writing assessments. She also provides guidance on how to further practice in writing assessment.