Students' Response to Our Response, Parts I and II / Jill Burkland and Nancy Grimm.

To gauge students' reactions to a teacher's written comments on final drafts of their papers, a questionnaire was administered to 197 students in six sections of freshman composition. Most of the students responding to the questionnaire were majoring in engineering, computer science, or business. Their six instructors had similar criteria for their papers, but used different grading methods. The four areas investigated were clarity of comments, transfer of comments to future papers, motivation or encouragement of students by comments, and the efficiency of time spent by teachers in responding. Results indicated that students found teacher comments unclear, sometimes unreadable, and containing the same type of writing errors for which they were penalized. Other findings showed that 52% of the students found comments helpful in writing the next paper, that more critical responses were more motivating, and that (with regard to the efficiency of teacher response to student papers), protocols for student review of returned papers would more effectively determine the quality of review. (A check list used by one instructor is appended.) (CRH)

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