“The Will to Revise: Commenting, Revision, and Motivation in College Students”
by Elizabeth Bracey | Xchanges 9.1
Literature Review
Paul R. Pintrich and Teresa Garcia elaborate on the concept of self-efficacy and its relationship to motivation in student learning in their study of student motivation and cognition. The authors explain that a student’s self-schema, or self-efficacy and perception of themselves and their abilities in academia, influence the student’s performance in a particular subject (116). For example, a student who has a positive self-schema regarding his intelligence, work ethic, or ability may perform better in academia than a student who has a negative self-schema. A student’s self-schema is also affected by the visualization of a particular goal and the recognition of “possible self” (116). That is, the student has knowledge about him or herself in the present and is also aware of “what [he or she] may become in the future” (116). This is to say that the student who has a goal to pursue a master’s degree in a particular subject may use the degree as a goal and, therefore, excel in classes that relate to the program of interest. This relates also to the idea of placing value on work that leads to the goal.
To this end, research also supports the need for the students to develop effective methods of planning in regard to their writing that will help them work toward specific revision goals. Barry J. Zimmerman and Anastasia Kistantis remark that a student must first observe and then emulate the writing strategies of their superiors before they eventually adopt self-control or the ability to plan an argument and approach it effectively on their own (242). Finally, and ideally, a writer will find him or herself able to self-regulate, meaning that he or she will be able to successfully adapt his/her writing strategies to effectively communicate points to various audiences upon various topics (242). The researchers posit that students who perform poorly on revision tasks do not properly move between self-control or process-oriented writing, in which the primary focus is planning and structure, and self-regulation or outcome-oriented writing, in which the primary focus is improving the overall effectiveness of an argument.
Like Zimmerman and Kistantis, Nancy Sommers feels that teacher comments are helpful in students’ process of revision. However, in Sommers’s view, teacher commenting often suffers from “rubber stamping” (“Responding to Student Writing” 126). That is, a teacher’s comments on one paper are not text specific and could be applied equally as well to a completely different paper because of the comments’ vagaries (126). This type of commenting points out to students that something might be wrong with the writing, but the comment does not explain well enough what the problem is. Thus, the student cannot revise his or her work effectively and likely cannot understand the nature of the problems that are being pointed out.
Moreover, Sommers points out that teachers concentrate too much on sentence-level errors and word choice, often opting to eliminate a word from a sentence or changing several words rather than asking questions about the student’s intent or thinking about suggestions for the paragraph overall. Focusing too much on problems with diction “gives students an impression of the importance of these errors that is out of proportion” (124), making them focus on syntactical problems more than flaws in coherence and logic.
Chris Anson elaborates on this idea in his article “Response Styles and Ways of Knowing” in which he categorizes different types of commenting and their effects on students’ perceptions of teacher expectations. Anson names three styles of commenting: dualistic, which focuses mostly on grammar and syntax and encourages an extremely black-and-white view of writing; relativistic, which tends toward lengthy end notes offering personal suggestions but that sometimes lose focus on the actual text; and reflective, which offers comprehensive remarks that focus on “ideas, textual decisions, and personal reactions” (351), ultimately helping students reason through the logic of their argument. This balance of commenting, Anson found, “challenged” students to “rethink and explore” their ideas, prompting them to become more focused on global level issues (351).
However, like Zimmerman and Kisantis, neither Anson nor Sommers devotes enough attention to the role of commenting in creating motivation for students to revise their work carefully when, in fact, motivation seems to be primary in getting students more involved in their revision processes. This gap in research begs the question of what factors, in particular, motivate students to seek writing center tutoring for their college writing projects and, moreover, what types of commenting interventions are the most effective types of motivators for students as they revise their papers?