Article Analysis

Minchew, S. S. and McGrath, V. R.  (2001). Lasting benefits of cooperative editing for remedial freshman composition students: A follow-up study.  Community College Journal of Research and Practice 25. 591-606.

Minchew and McGrath (2001) highlight what they see as “[a] growing problem in higher education,” a challenge I face each semester as writing teacher of “the increasing number of students entering college underprepared for college-level work” (591).  At Parkland many of these underprepared students enter college writing through a series of developmental courses, one that I often teach.  It is with this teaching in mind that I sought out research specifically focused on community colleges.  Minchew and McGrath (2001) have focused on developing an editing approach for community college students to use.  Although the statistical analysis completed by the authors is encouraging, the tools they developed to analyze their students’ writing errors are what I find most interesting.

As a part of their first study, Minchew and McGrath (2001) developed a set of charts that they used to track the types of writing errors students made as a class and individually.  They recommend that instructors use these charts to help tailor both their instruction and the focus of cooperative editing groups.  In my instructional practice I often identify common errors to discuss with the class.  However, Minchew and McGrath (2001) offer a more systematic approach for tracking errors and structuring cooperative editing around these errors.  Being able to form peer groups based on these errors seems like it could be a powerful way to structure cooperative feedback.  I have often thought about grouping students based on writing strengths and weaknesses so they can more effectively help one another.  Minchew and McGrath (2001) offer a clear way to create such groups.

Overview of a Blog

I recently read an interesting blog called "I'll grade higher next semester, you bet" by Lisa Lane, who is a Professor at MiraCosta College.

She speaks about technology that she ran across called CVC and MyEdu and stated that these two companies were teaming up to help students figure out their college career. She was very curious about this and made an account which showed her information about her and her classes.

Professor Lane found that the first three courses listed on MyEdu were not hers but were taught by a colleague of hers. This made her even more curious so she looked up the "view grades/courses" link and to her surprise, it showed her grade distribution. It didn't just have the grade distribution but it showed trends indicating whether the instructor was likely to grade higher or lower this semester for each class!

This was very interesting to me because it made the classroom "public" and showed trends of high and low grades by semester so that students could fish around for classes and see what classes to take or not take according to high and low grades. Professor Lane did confirm that these grades were correct and it seemed odd and scary to me that a University would let these grades leak to the public especially since all of the HIPPA laws that have been put in place.

I know that we shouldn't believe everything we read, especially on the internet, but I do agree with Professor Lane that websites like this that are free and that are claiming to “cu

t college costs by up to 20 percent by reducing the amount of time it takes to earn a degree and helping students stay on track” can damage the roles of Universities.

My question to this is "what is next" and how far will these websites go until individuals do not physically attend a building anymore and sit behind a desk or laptop/Ipad and learn from what they see online?