But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.
By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-making, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."
But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.
According to the most recent statistics, the U.S. share of foreign students fell from 24 percent in 2000 to just below 19 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan saw increased market shares from their 2000 levels, though they are still far below the American numbers.
And even with its declining share, the United States still commands 9 percentage points more of the market than its nearest competitor, Britain.
A 2008 Rand Corp. report found that nearly two-thirds of the most highly cited articles in science and technology come from the United States, and seven in 10 Nobel Prize winners are employed by American universities. And the United States spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.
But over the long term, exactly where countries sit in the university hierarchy will be less and less relevant, as Americans' understanding of who is "us" and who is "them" gradually changes. Already, a historically unprecedented level of student and faculty mobility has become a defining characteristic of global higher education. Cross-border scientific collaboration, as measured by the volume of publications by co-authors from different countries, has more than doubled in two decades.
I don't know many teachers that thought their teacher education program was worth their time, so I would totally disagree with this -- weak students end up as teachers. I once had a teacher educator tell me that 'grades' were the most significant indicator of a good teacher. I laughed at her because I won the top teaching award and a year earlier I wouldn't have been accepted because my grades wouldn't have made their particular cut.
I have to agree with Lori. I have several colleagues who were not admitted into teacher education programs, yet have become amazing instructional leaders. Granted, there has to be a cutoff for programs, but frankly, grades are indeed not the best indicator. I was not allowed to take an advance-level French course because of my overall GPA during my undergraduate education. Later as a high school French teacher, my students consistently placed out of university language requirements, and while with me, often placed in declamation contests for their spoken abilities. Our teacher educations programs still need work. They are not where we want them to be. Now to get to work on how to make that happen! :-)
the computer, keeping detailed records on student performance
and using these records in making decisions about what is next to be presented
to the student.
In our
traditional learning environments, some students learn and some do not.
It is this second group of students that we want to help.
problem of almost all modern learning is the lecture, a noninteractive
way of learning
, on a moment-to-moment basis, just what the
student knows and just what learning problems are occurring
It begins immediately with
a question, with no preceding text.
experience the joy of
discovery.
tutorial approach
to learning makes it possible for everyone to learn.
critical factor
is that we can react to individual student problems
key concept for
structuring highly interactive learning experiences is the Benjamin Bloom
concept of mastery learning.
goal is for everyone to learn everything
to the mastery level, grades will no longer be useful
A student who has not learned in one
way probably needs a different approach, rather than another go-round
with the material that was not previously successful in assisting learning.
In such an environment,
learning and evaluation are no longer separate activities but are part
of the same process, intimately blended. So the student is not conscious
of taking tests, and we avoid the problems of cheating.
highly interactive learning is intrinsically motivating.
Motivation is particularly important in a distance-learning environment,
since none of the "threats" of the classroom, such as low grades, are
available.
mastery-based computer
segment could also offer human contact. Small groups could work together,
either locally or remotely via electronic communication.
existing authoring systems. Since they were, and
still are, mostly directed toward supplying information, these were inadequate
for creating highly interactive software.
Bertrand Ibrahim at the University
of Geneva,
omputer stores much of the information as the students
progress through the material.
Teaching
faculty, in the sense that we know them today, may cease to exist, except
for in smaller, advanced courses. But their skills and experiences will
be important in the design of learning modules.
High costs of development
can lead to low costs per student, if many students use the material.
$30,000 per student-hour of high-quality learning
material
highly
effective highly interactive distance-learning courses would have a large
potential market, making them much cheaper per student than current courses,
and if well developed, they will be much superior for almost all students
The typical approach is to give some released time to faculty and to give
limited support for programming and media production. It is unlikely,
almost impossible, that good learning material will be developed this
way.
Universities are
too stuck in their current ways of doing things to be able to compete
with well-developed material from "outside." Most university faculty and
administrators do not appreciate the current problems of learning and
so are not prepared for these future directions.
First, students tend to lose interest in
whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up,
motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try
to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult
assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a
top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less
impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even
long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of
traditional grades.
Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely
different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades
used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to
sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to
figure out who is better than whom)
Standardized tests often have the additional
disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the
classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate
answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more
than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot,
high-anxiety basis.
The test
designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage
to answer correctly.
the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely
to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
1. Students come to regard learning as a
chore.
intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation
tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing
something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had
to do to get the reward.
2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
they’re just being rational. They have
adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual
exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional
grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other
incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are
unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see
what they’re capable of doing.
This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
They seem to be
fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump
they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re
helpless to do anything about it.
When the point isn’t to
figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to
cope with being less than good.
It may be the systemic demand for high
achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even
if the failure is only relative.
But even when better forms of assessment are
used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less
important than why she thinks she got that score.
just smart
luck:
tried hard
task difficulty
It bodes well for the future
the punch line: When students are led to focus on
how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their
performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
In their
study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that
teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and
keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to
attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside
their control, such as a lack of ability.
When students are made to
think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to
explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard
they tried.
And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as
"smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will
bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect
on other kids.
The upshot of all this is that beliefs about
intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure
matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how
confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how
they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher
standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores
and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make
sense of those results.
the problem with tests is not limited
to their content.
if too big a deal is made
about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to
think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
As Martin
Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have
concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the
pursuit of excellence."
Only now and then does it make sense for the
teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how
they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should
be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized
tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in
learning.
the findings
of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are
thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the
students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm
for learning is apt to wane.
The underlying problem concerns
a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work
in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the
difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and
focusing on what you’re doing.
The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course,
but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
But when we get carried away with results, we wind up,
paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
Unfortunately,
common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to
dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and
design of the most common forms of assessment--both within
classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous
consequences.
grades, which by their very
nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not
that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students
have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to
school.
research indicates that the use of traditional
letter or number grades is reliably associated with three
consequences.
The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
What I can say is that the MBSR program has been
around for 30 years and there have been hundreds of clinical trials indicating that
it is effective for reducing stress and many (though not all) clinical symptoms.
All the participants in our study went through the
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
course (MBSR) developed at the Center for Mindfulness
I can't stop thinking/my mind won't calm down/"Unusual phenomena" bother me when I meditate/I can't meditate—what should I do?
OR
When I meditate, I experience "unusual phenomena". What is going on? Is this
an advanced state?
The Buddha compared the mind to the strings of a lute (a guitar-like instrument): the
lute can not be played if the strings are too tight or too loose. Similarly when attention
is either too tight or too loose, you can't properly meditate. When attention is too loose,
the mind wanders and you get lost in thought. Try narrowing your focus in different ways
(e.g. just inhales instead of the whole breath, focus on a smaller area around your nose).
Some people do a few minutes of yoga or loving kindness (metta) practice at the start of
their meditation period to focus the mind, before switching to breath awareness meditation.
Some people find focusing on sounds easier than focusing on breathing.
The goal is not to try to change anything, but to be aware of the desire to change it and then see if we can just relax and be ok with it even if it doesn't change. Are we trying to quiet the storm, or are we trying to find peace within the storm?
Of course, students could benefit from choosing a school that challenges students' strengths and helps them improve their weaknesses. But the point is that the school's style could matter.
Where these preferences particularly become a problem is when the styles that lead to success in a particular course do not match the styles that will be needed for success either in more advanced courses in the same discipline, or, worse, in the occupation for which the course prepares students.
or example, in most occupations, one does not sit around taking short-answer or multiple-choice tests on the material one needs to succeed in the job. The risk, then, is that schools will reward students whose styles match the way they are taught but not the requirements of the work for which the teaching prepares them.
The studying that middle school and high school students do after the dismissal
bell rings is either an unreasonable burden or a crucial activity that needs
beefing up. Which is it? Do American students have too much homework or too
little? Neither, I’d say. We ought to be asking a different question altogether.
What should matter to parents and educators is this: How effectively do
children’s after-school assignments advance learning?
The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality.
And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although
surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen
over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of
international academic
rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to
results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last
December.
“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques
that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it
works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as
many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one
evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in
briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach,
students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction
throughout the semester.
In general, we almost never see people use advanced search. And when they do, they typically use it incorrectly — partly because they use it so rarely that they never really learn how it works.
or many problems, the actual answer is right there. But the concept that you might have to sometimes go beyond search listings is getting lost
any problems, the actual answer is right there. But the concept that you might have to sometimes go beyond search listings is getting lost
Sadly, when one approach is so easy (and works much of the time), users never develop the research skills needed to try or even consider other approaches.
"Today, many users are so reliant on search that it's undermining their problem-solving abilities. Ironically, the better search gets, the more dangerous it gets as people increasingly assume that whatever the search engine coughs up must be the answer."
A combination of tools such as graphic novels, board games, and online games
will be developed for middle school students.
The online version of the high school Pathfinder card game will have
players guide a character through class and activity selection, time management
challenges, putting together application materials, and acquiring the financial
resources to afford college and its related costs. Games are to take about a
week to complete and will require 5–10 minutes at a time to advance the game.
The goal of the game is not only to be accepted but also to be able to afford
and be prepared to succeed at the player's college of choice. Students can
repeat play the game using characters with different backgrounds.
Bill Tierney at USC got over a million bucks to modify his card game called Pathfinders to an online version so it can be played on Facebook. "The intended audience is students with low-income backgrounds who are not aware of their postsecondary options and who attend schools lacking strong college guidance counseling." Hope the players can cash in their winnings at a local casino and get real money to pay for college! That would be even better!
These days, pen-and-paper and word-processing skills are not enough to fully prepare students for writing beyond K-12. Students also need direct instruction in digital writing—or writing created or read on a computer or other Internet-connected device. Digital writing requires both traditional writing skills—knowledge of the process, conventions, organizational structure, etc.—and more advanced techniques, such as the ability to meld visual, audio, and text into a single piece.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Read on and tell me why Farmers markets have failed to advance the sustainable and local food movement.
What we need is a system of local “food hubs” that can process and bundle local foods and deliver them to the places where America eats.
Perhaps the only thing all these food hubs share is a conviction that there is value in preserving regional identity, artisanal character, and sustainable practices—in saving some products from the great meat grinder of industrial food distribution.
Some simply bundle the produce of multiple small farms to reach the consistent volumes and product diversity required to supply local markets. Some are purely virtual marketplaces that allow chefs to find available produce from regional farms and buy it directly. Some have a social mission to not only bring foods to underprivileged neighborhoods but to increase food literacy as well, or to guarantee fair prices to farms and farmworkers. And some specialize in incubating new producers like Pete
See an audio slide show about the Mad River Food Hub at the Reimagining Infrastructure series homepage, www.orionmagazine.org/infrastructure.
Richard Ludlow started the nonprofit Academic Earth two years ago after M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare helped him pass linear algebra as a Yale undergraduate. His site offers the courses of 10 elite universities — 130 full courses and more than 3,500 video lectures. Viewers can turn the tables on professors and grade courses. Other guidance includes "Editor's Picks" and "Playlists," lectures selected around a theme like "First Day of Freshman Year" and "You Are What You Eat."
Connexions, started at Rice University 10 years ago, debundles education for the D.I.Y. learner. Anyone can write a "module," the term for instructional material that can be a single sentence or 1,000 pages. Connexions hosts more than 16,000 modules that make up almost 1,000 "collections." A collection might be, say, an algebra textbook or statistics course.
Daniel Colman is a curator of sorts. He sifts through the vast amount of free courses, movies and books offered online to find what he considers the very best in content and production value. Then he features them on Open Culture, the Web site he founded in 2006. It's a task in keeping with his mission as associate dean and director of Stanford's continuing education program.
At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.
Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)
Thousands of pieces of free educational material - videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks - have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? Businesses, social entrepreneurs and "edupunks," envisioning a tuition-free world untethered by classrooms, have created Web sites to help navigate the mind-boggling volume of content. Some sites tweak traditional pedagogy; others aggregate, Hulu-style.
Continuously upgrade educators' classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite
of "highly effective" teaching
Home
Advocacy
Top Ten in '10: ISTE's Education Technology Priorities for 2010
Through a common focus on boosting student achievement and closing the
achievement gap, policymakers and educators alike are now reiterating their
commitment to the sorts of programs and instructional efforts that can have
maximum effect on instruction and student outcomes.
This commitment requires a keen understanding of both past accomplishment and
strategies for future success. Regardless of the specific improvement paths a
state or school district may chart, the use of technology in teaching and
learning is non-negotiable if we are to make real and lasting change.
With growing anticipation for Race to the Top (RttT) and Investing in
Innovation (i3) awards in 2010, states and school districts are seeing increased
attention on educational improvement, backed by financial support through these
grants.
As we think about plans for the future, the International Society for
Technology in Education (ISTE) has identified 10 priorities essential for making
good on this commitment in 2010:
1.
Establish technology in education as the
backbone of school improvement
. To truly improve our schools for the
long term and ensure that all students are equipped with the knowledge and
skills necessary to achieve in the 21st century, education technology must
permeate every corner of the learning process. From years of research, we
know that technology can serve as a primary driver for systemic school
improvement, including school leadership, an improved learning culture and
excellence in professional practice. We must ensure that technology is at the
foundation of current education reform efforts, and is explicit and clear in its
role, mission, and expected impact.
2.
Leverage education technology as a gateway
for college and career readiness
. Last year, President Obama established
a national goal of producing the highest percentage of college graduates in the
world by the year 2020. To achieve this goal in the next 10 years, we must
embrace new instructional approaches that both increase the college-going rates
and the high school graduation rates. By effectively engaging learning
through technology, teachers can demonstrate the relevance of 21st century
education, keeping more children in the pipeline as they pursue a rigorous,
interesting and pertinent PK-12 public education.
3.
Ensure technology expertise is infused
throughout our schools and classrooms.
In addition to providing all
teachers with digital tools and content we must ensure technology experts are
integrated throughout all schools, particularly as we increase focus and
priority on STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) instruction and
expand distance and online learning opportunities for students. Just as we
prioritize reading and math experts, so too must we place a premium on
technology experts who can help the entire school maximize its resources and
opportunities. To support these experts, as well as all educators who
integrate technology into the overall curriculum, we must substantially increase
our support for the federal Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT)
program. EETT provides critical support for on-going professional
development, implementation of data-driven decision-making, personalized
learning opportunities, and increased parental involvement. EETT should be
increased to $500 million in FY2011.
4.
Continuously upgrade educators' classroom
technology skills as a pre-requisite
of "highly
effective" teaching
. As part of our nation's continued push to ensure
every classroom is led by a qualified, highly effective teacher, we must commit
that all P-12 educators have the skills to use modern information tools and
digital content to support student learning in content areas and for student
assessment. Effective teachers in the 21st Century should be, by definition,
technologically savvy teachers.
5. Invest in pre-service education
technology
We contend that student writers will see greater value in peer response if they develop tools that allow them to participate more actively in the feedback process. With teaching suggestions like those above, writers can learn how to re-flect on their experiences with peer response. They can also learn to identify their needs as writers and how to ask questions that will solicit the feedback they need.
We like to limit each mock session to no more than seven minutes of back and forth between respondent and writer.
This becomes a teachable moment. When the respondent asks for assistance from the class, this break in the session becomes an opportunity for the class to assist the writer and the respondent. The writer appears stuck, not knowing what to ask. And the respondent appears perplexed, too.
we follow Carl Anderson’s suggestion to teach students how to ask questions about their writing through role-playing.
dynamic list that students freely update throughout the semester on the class classro
organize the questions within categories such as tone, content, evidence-based support, style, and logistics
The end result is a robust list of questions for writers to ask of their respondents.
in-class discussion about effective and less effective questions for writers
raft three to five questions they have about the assignment to ask of their peers as they prepare to write or revise their assignment. When appropriate, we can direct our students to the course text, where there are
: pointing, summarizing, and reflecting
Students’ comments often point to their struggle to position themselves in peer response.
“What would it take for you to be in-vested as writers in peer response?” Students’ typical responses include the following:>“I need to know what to ask.” >“I don’t know what to ask about my writing, except for things like punctua-tion and grammar.”>“Does the person reading my work really know what the assignment is? Bet-ter than I do?”>“I’m not really sure if I’m supposed to talk or ask questions when someone is giving me feedback about my work, so I don’t really do anything. They write stuff on my paper. Sometimes I read it if I can, but I don’t really know what to do with it.”
it is important to offer activities to ensure that both respondents and writers are able to articulate a clear purpose of what they are trying to accomplish. These activities, guided by the pedagogies used to prepare writing center consultants
devote more attention to the respondent than to the writer, we may unwit-tingly be encouraging writers to be bystanders, rather than active participants, in the response process.
, “Feedback: What Works for You and How Do You Get It?”
highlight the value of both giving and getting feedback:In 56 pages near the end of this book, we’ve explained all the good methods we know for getting feedback from classmates on your writing. . . . The ability to give responses to your classmates’ writing and to get their responses to your own writing may be the most important thing you learn from this book. (B
we question whether textbooks provide emergent writers with enough tools or explicit models to engage actively in peer response conversations.
While such questions are helpful to emerging writers, who depend on modeling, they lack explanation about what makes them “helpful” questions. As a result, emerging writers may perceive them as a prescriptive set of questions that must be answered (or worse, a set of questions to be “given over” to a respondent), rather than what they are intended to be: questions that could advance the writer’s thoughts and agenda.
this information is limited to the instructor’s manual
llustrates the difference be-tween vague and helpful questions, pointing out that helpful questions
You will need to train students to ask good questions, which will help reviewers target their attention.Questions like “How can I make this draft better?” “What grade do you think this will get?” and “What did you think?” are not helpful, as they are vague and don’t reflect anything about the writer’s own thoughts. Questions like “Am I getting off topic in the introduction when I talk about walking my sister to the corner on her first day of school?” or “Does my tone on page 3 seem harsh? I’m trying to be fair to the people who disagree with the decision I’m describing” help readers understand the writer’s purpose and will set up good conversations. (Harrington 14, emphasis added
uestions” when soliciting feedback (like the advice we found in many textbooks), she also provides explicit examples for doing so
he most explicit advice for writers about ask-ing questions and, in effect, setting up good conversations is buried in an instruc-tor’s manual for The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing. In thi
“Getting Response” chapter later in the book, they will benefit from the textbook authors’ instructions that they should in fact use questions that will help them solicit their feedback
dependent on what parts of the textbook they choose to read
point writers to a specific set of questions that they should ask of their respondents. Such instructions take a notable step toward shifting the locus of control from the respondent to helping writers engage their peers in conversation.
there is no mention that writers might use them for purposes of soliciting feedback.
we see an opportunity for modeling that is not fully realized.
we argue that Faigley offers respondents specific examples that empower them to actively engage the process and give feedback. We contend that emergent writers need a similar level of instruction if they are to be agents in response.
textbook authors offer few examples for how to get specific feedback
Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff ’s first edition of A Community of Writers published in 1995, in which eleven “Sharing and Responding” techniques, d
we worked to understand how textbooks highlight the writer’s role in peer response.
We wanted to know what books tell writers about asking questions
lthough we do not discount the importance of teaching respondents how to give feedback, we argue that writers must also be taught how to request the feedback they desire.
US has long been mediocre or at the bottom of international comparisons, but it's not a zer-sum game
