Chris M. Anson; Matthew Davis; Domenica Vilhotti--"What Do We Want In This Paper?"

Chris M. Anson; Matthew Davis; Domenica Vilhotti--"What Do We Want In This Paper?"
Excerpted from Teaching with Student Texts. pp. 35-45

The essay attempts to "describe a method designed to help students articulate and internalize readers' expectations for their assigned writing." This is an issue because students often fail to understand and evaluate their revisions and their classmates revisions because the criteria are unclear.

Their idea is constructivist in that students develop criteria for the assignment based on their review of 'interestingly problematic' student drafts.

CREATING CRITERIA FROM SAMPLE STUDENT DRAFTS

We write based on socially constructed expectations for a piece of writing.
Students often have to infer and inductively guess what professors are looking for in a writing assignment.

Students bring in prior knowledge when writing, but whenever they get out of their comfort zone or area of knowledge/memory, "they often work in an experiential void."

The authors use drafts as a focus point for the class to constructively acknowledge and develop the criteria for the assignment.

The process looks something like this:

• Instructor provides the writing assignment--They receive the formal instructions and pertinent information about genre, goals, content, use of sources, etc.
• Instructor distributes "interestingly problematic" student drafts--They give students drafts of previous essays for the same assignment. The drafts aren't perfect or terrible, but present interesting problems for class discussion. The students read and analyze the essays beforehand. 
• Students individually analyze drafts--students come to a conclusion about features that work or don't work.
• Students collectively derive principles and criteria--
• Instructor publishes final criteria for student use--The teacher formalizes the criteria (e.g. rubric) so the students can use it as a formative guide. 

Example 1: A Guided, Small-Group Approach to Student-Generated Rubrics

• The teacher set up stations that look explicitly at certain portions of an "interestingly problematic" draft.
• The students move from station to station in groups of three and take 10 minutes at each station.
• The students are directed to focus on audience, structure, diction.
•  Students mark good and awkward sections.
• If they can't articulate what works or doesn't, they can refer to previous lessons and handouts about effective writing practices. 
• The teacher collects the responses and builds the criteria for the assignment. 

Example 2: Deriving Principles from Sample Texts

•  The professor is teaching new TAs who will be teaching composition for the first time.
• The TAs review "interestingly problematic" assignment instructions.
• The students analyze them and note what's problematic, what worked well, what stood out, etc.
• The TAs then develop the criteria for what makes a good assignment and why.

Example 3: Creating Rubrics for Specific Genres

• Students create, amend, and reorganize a rubric for a participant-observation study report.
• The students read a draft, refer back to the assignment, and then craft a rubric, which has three evaluative categories that explains what performance fits in which category. 
• Students take the rubric home and amend at least one category, making local and/or global changes.
• He then collects the changes and forms it into a final rubric, which the class approves by a vote. 

The process:

• "provides instructors with formative assessment that guides their decisions about the course's shape and content."
• "can also result in students developing relatively nuanced and sophisticated insights completely on their own."
• "students are actively engaged in negotiating the ways that generic conventions influence textual choices about data collection, presentation, and interpretation."
• In creating rubrics, students "are learning skills and strategies useful in other discursive settings where texts, and their standards, may be unfamiliar to them."

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