Developmental Writing

I received an email invitation I thought others might be interested in hearing about.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Speaking about Composition Online Conference

This all-day, online conference allows you to gain inspirational insights and learn practical ideas for your teaching – all from the comfort of your home or office. There is no registration fee; all you need is a computer and an internet connection.

Our speakers include Mike Rose, Anne Wysocki, Dennis Lynch, Dan Anderson, Charles Paine, Richard Johnson-Sheehan, and many more renowned teachers and rhetoricians. To view the Speaking about Composition program, read about our speakers, and register for sessions, please visit the website. Register for just one session or sign up for several sessions. There are no fees!

I am not sure I will be able to participate, but I wanted to let everyone know about this opportunity.

Community college professors sometimes complain that we are now doing the work that should have been done in the high schools. Maybe so, but we need this work. And the large numbers carry one advantage for the students—most of the stigma that used to be attached to these courses has dissipated. The handicap is just too common.

by Jack Miller in American Experiment

I am teaching three Developmental Writing classes this semester. I will be teaching three again in the spring. This is a joy to me, since I want to teach developmental students. It is also a frustration to me, since I am not sure I know the best way to teach them.

I am going to really have to work on this.

An interesting literature review (in Measuring the Effectiveness of Developmental Writing Courses showed up in a search I was doing.

Studies on the effectiveness of basic writing programs have concluded overall that these programs are effective. Three such studies, by Stein (1982) at Minnesota Community College, by Ragland (1997) at Central Missouri State University, and by Weissman et al. (1997) at the College of Lake County (a community college in Chicago), concluded that students who completed developmental skills courses were more likely to succeed in college-level writing classes than were students who did not complete preparatory work. Glau (1996) reported that developmental courses that focused on grammar at Arizona State University were ineffective but that an extended developmental program that concentrated on writing did prepare students for success in Composition I.

Researchers have also concluded that developmental courses should be required and not optional when students fall below the cut-off score on placement exams (Berger, 1997; Weissman et al., 1997). However, placement tests can be imperfect tools, even when content validity has been achieved (Schmitz & delMas, 1991). Schmitz and delMas (1991) noted that while a test’s content validity is essential, decisions based on the test must also prove to be accurate. If a test facilitates accurate decisions about placement, students who score low but do not take developmental classes will not do as well academically as their counterparts who receive remediation, and retention will be higher for students who need and receive preparatory work before college classes (Schmitz & delMas, 1991). McCormick and McCormick’s 1986 study of students in developmental writing classes at Eastern Illinois University addressed the correlation between the students’ placement scores and their future academic success in all their other classes. Comparing developmental students to non-developmental students, the researchers found no significant difference in the areas of credits earned, graduation rates, and grades earned in college-level writing courses. However, those developmental students with lower placement scores had lower GPAs and were more likely to be placed on academic probation than were students with higher placement scores.

It seems to me that if the program is successful, students who complete developmental courses OUGHT to do better than students who placed at the same level but did not. I do wonder why the students who were not in the courses got around the requirement though.

I was intrigued by the title How to Speed Up Your Learning Rate, by Scott H. Young.

One of the skills I have found incredibly useful in my own life is the ability to learn new things rapidly with excellent comprehension. I hear a lot of talk about how learning abilities and styles are predetermined and our learning rate is fixed. I think this is garbage. Certainly our genetic predispositions and childhood environments give us certain biases towards learning, but if there is anything I have found to be true is that our learning rate can be improved markedly through the use of simple methods to help process that information more quickly.

Okay, he caught my attention. What else is there?

His answer? Stories.

Stories, metaphors and analogies are a powerful way to facilitate your own rapid learning. By creating connections to something your brain already understands you can utilize its incredible power. If you are presented material in a way you can’t quite understand or remember, try using a story to help the material sink in. Use stories and metaphors and you can speed up your own learning rate.

He gives examples in the blog post, including elements wearing clothes… Can I find a picture of that? Nope.

The Teacher’s Edge has a discussion, by Maureen Dolan, on what community colleges are doing to cut costs. This impacts access, obviously.

Chicago’s community college system is considering putting an end to offering remedial courses, a move that would limit community college accessibility for prospective students whose reading, writing or math skills show they aren’t prepared for college-level work.

Education Week magazine reported last week that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley cited the high cost of remedial programs as a reason to cut them. Daley suggested the money spent on remedial courses might be better spent at alternative high schools to get students’ skills up to college-level.

Of course, you cut classes, you are also cutting the work of the college. The same article talks of North Idaho College’s remedial courses and says these classes “represent 9 percent of the total credits received by students at the college.”

Yes, remedial courses cost money. Yes, it is important to save money. But if the students, particularly returning students, can’t take the class at a college, will they take it anywhere?

I found a CFP from Changing Lives Through Literature that I thought might make a good alternative narrative paper topic. Our class papers are shorter, but it’s possible that if someone did a good job on the shorter version, the blog might be interested.

I think I’m going to offer it as an option.

Changing Lives Through Literature is an alternative sentencing program founded in 1991 on the power of literature to transform lives.

In 2008 we launched a blog, Changing Lives, Changing Minds: http://cltl.umassd.edu/blog.

We have featured essays from professors, graduate students, judges, lawyers, and other scholars from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Topics range from literature and its impact on people to alternative sentencing and issues in our justice system.

We invite you to submit a 500-800 word piece to be featured on the site. Any topic that deals with literature or writing and the way in which they affect individuals (now or historically) is fair game. You might consider using one or more of the questions below as a jumping off point for an entry or bring ideas of your own to the blog.

* Is there a book that has profoundly impacted your life or way of thinking? Tell us about how you, yourself, have been transformed by a piece of literature.

* How does the act of “reading” change as our society grows more technologically advanced and dependent? Will there continue to be a place for the printed book or are we destined for a future where reading is limited to computer and Kindle screens? How does reading in an electronic medium differ from the experience of reading a book?

* How do individuals or groups of people create identity through reading and writing (either historically or currently)?

* How important is it for students to be able to see themselves in the texts they read in classes? What role should one’s personal connections with the text play in classroom discussions?

* How have your writing experiences changed you? Is there a particular writing endeavor (such as a book, an essay, or a creative piece) that made you understand something about yourself or others?

These are just a few ideas. If your interests include criminal justice, politics, law, etc. we encourage you to bring those to the table as well.

If you are interested in submitting an essay, email us and we’ll give you a list of available dates. No technical expertise required. Just send us your essay as an attachment to cltl@umassd.edu along with a 1-3 line bio.

A reading reform initiative succeeded in increasing reading skills, even though its administrative support was let go.

A five-year reform effort in San Diego schools succeeded in raising literacy levels for lagging elementary and middle school students by increasing the amount of time spent on reading, the authors find. Among the other ingredients for success: professional development for teachers, a comprehensive vision and execution by the school district—and considerable patience in waiting for results.

The Educated Guess says

It turns out that it was more successful in improving reading skills of elementary and middle school students than acknowledged at the time, though not in high school, where it was largely a failure.

In elementary and high school, more time helped. Not in high school. I wonder why not. Here’s one guess:

In elementary schools, an extended year for lowest achieving “focus schools” also brought up scores significantly. Less effective was an extended day reading program, in which first through ninth grade students lagging behind their peers were assigned three 90-minute periods each week of supervised reading before or after school.

But what worked in middle and elementary schools backfired in high school, with students assigned to double and triple length classes actually regressing in their scores. Betts and others speculated that high school students felt stigmatized or that some high school English teachers, used to teaching literature, disliked remediation instruction.

So what did they decide about it?

Betts and others concluded that extra classroom time for students who are behind in reading, combined with teacher training “can lead to meaningful gains in literacy.” An extended school year in middle school for students who are behind showed the most promise. The failure of the programs to take root in high school underscored the value of intensive intervention in elementary and middle school. “Early intervention to aid students who lag behind in reading might be far more effective than intervention in high school,” the study concluded.

I wonder what that means for college-level developmental reading.

I doubt it means the same thing, because students learning to read in college WANT to know how to read. It may take longer though, since younger students learn faster than older students.

Found because I read Joanne Jacobs on a regular basis.

How do you choose what readings to assign? Rarely does anyone assign all the readings in the English book. Imagine the Norton Anthology (all 4500 pgs of it) assigned in a sophomore lit class. Not likely.

So, how do you choose readings to assign?

I was going through the new book for my Developmental Writing class. There are 75 possible readings. I couldn’t read them all, obviously. But how did I choose?

Some are too sad. No. If you’ve read the blog for long, you know how I feel about sad endings. I just don’t like them. But I understand that sometimes you must read sad things. See Teaching Literature: Sad vs Funny for how I introduce this topic to my students.

Some are too vulgar. No. I do not feel able to present this reading without offending someone. I am going to stay away from it. It might make for good discussion, but I am not going to have the students read it.

Others, there is vulgarity, but for a point. One speaks of a woman showing off her pubic hair to an older woman as a way of embarrassing the old woman. I’m going to read that one. I think the students will be interested in the older etiquette and it will allow us to talk about social mores and how they differ among cultural groups.

Some I choose because they talk about information the students might not know.

Some because I know other information that might make them even more interesting.

It’s an interesting experience, reading through a text to choose the assigned readings.

An article on Minding the Campus, Why Remediation Doesn’t Work, began with a point I have longed to make to President Obama. Exactly how are we going to force people to graduate from college? Should we give them diplomas when they are born, as the article says?

But then the article goes into a serious discussion on why students are not graduating from college in six years.

The crucial question is why remediation does not work. My hypothesis is that there are inadequate incentives for students who arrive without sufficient preparation to take seriously that that have deficiencies requiring remediation. Without incentives to put in the enormously difficult task of learning in a course or two how to read and write effectively, a task they should have learned gradually over many years, they simply go through the motions. The colleges go through the motions also. In egregious cases they make students repeat remedial courses once or twice. But what if students are so underprepared that they need five or six repetitions of remedial course work to show substantial results? No college would dare to require this, and no underprepared student would stand for it.

I have a couple of narrative points. (That is, I have individual stories that prove that what Jackson Toby says won’t happen can and does.)

1. Guy I dated in grad school… He was in college when he learned to read and write. And he managed to graduate within six years. The difference was, perhaps, that he wanted to learn how to do those things.

2. My college allows/requires students who are not making at least a C to continue on in their developmental classes by taking them again. They don’t allow Ds or Fs. If a student is still in class and still doing the work on the drop date (one month before school is out), then they receive an IP and are allowed into another version of the course the next semester without any cost. If a student is not in class and/or not doing the work on the drop date, they are withdrawn.

(Being withdrawn actually has serious consequences. 1. After six Ws, a student must pay full price for their education, not the taxpayer-funded discount. 2. After six Ws in one school, a student is not allowed to graduate from there.)

YMMV.

But it means it is doable.

Now we need to see how it can be done.