"Life Factors" Emerges Consistently as a Key Determinant of Student Online Success

As discussed in a previous post, Life Factors is one of the attributes measured by SmarterMeasure, the assessment tool that evaluates students' levels of readiness for online learning. Life Factors evaluates situations in a student's life that may or may not be within his or her control. Such conditions include a student's ability to devote sufficient time to academic work; a student's access to a dedicated site that is conducive for study and learning; the reason or rationale for which a student is pursuing higher education; a student's access to sufficient resources that include stable finances, sound personal health, and support for educational pursuits among family members and from an employer; and demonstration of past ability to maintain academic commitments.  

(Re-)Framing Student Success

Last month, three of the major professional organizations in my field, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP), released a landmark document that was years in the making:  the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.

The Framework is getting a great deal of attention right now among teachers of composition and rhetoric because it combines a set of demonstrable, cognitive skills and outcomes in five areas we have traditionally used as metrics for student performance (rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, writing processes, knowledge of conventions, and abilities to compose in multiple environments) with less measurable, affective dispositions the framers call “habits of mind”:

o  Curiosity – the desire to know more about the world.

o  Openness – the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.

o  Engagement – a sense of investment and involvement in learning.

o  Creativity – the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.

o  Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.

o  Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.

o  Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.

o  Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

The complete version of the Framework does an admirable job beginning the conversation about how these habits might be measured and assessed (see pp. 4-5). Here’s one example of how the third habit, engagement (a sense of investment and involvement in learning), is fleshed out:
   
Engagement is fostered when writers are encouraged to

• make connections between their own ideas and those of others;

• find meanings new to them or build on existing meanings as a result of new connections; and

• act upon the new knowledge that they have discovered.

Can we come up with ways to measure an individual student’s level of “engagement” (or persistence, or flexibility, or metacognition, or any of the other habits of mind) through a comprehensive examination of that student’s body of work over the course of a semester?  Or, perhaps more important to our shared goal of instilling transferable, postsecondary skills and dispositions in our students, can we come up with ways to give our students the capacity to measure their own progress in these areas and to chronicle that progress with artifacts from their own body of work? 

This conversation will need to be continued by all of us in more detail. It is a conversation worth having, both inside the discipline of composition and rhetoric and across all academic disciplines. I encourage all of us to think about how we could each create individual, course-based, and programmatic assessments that honor the education of the whole student, if for no other reason than to start our students on the road to recovery from the unconscionably reductive assessments they have come to expect from their K-12 instruction during the era of SOLs. 

--Miles McCrimmon

Professor of English

Should you teach online?

Rob Jenkins, a frequent commentator in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and an Associate Professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College offers this somewhat tongue-in-cheek advice for instructors who are considering teaching online courses.

What are your thoughts? Post your comments here.

The Question of Multimodal Composing: What’s That (Visual) Argument? (Part 2 of 2)

This post continues the discussion begun in Part One of the article, published on March 14, 2011.

Cynthia Haller (2010) conducted a study on three student research papers in an upper division research—junior level—writing course. She questioned the manner in which students learn to recognize academic arguments in source materials and how they integrate and use them in their own writing. She asks, “What does it mean to construct an academic argument using disciplinary discourse?” (p. 34). Haller found that “[o]nly students who had had extensive experience with reading and writing within their disciplines and across a range of disciplinary contexts were able to successfully identify, explain, and engage discipline-based criteria for writing” (p. 36). Her focus on an upper-division course is relevant to a study that focuses on FYC because it is in FYC where students begin to learn their way around the academic discourse community to then compose for their specific disciplines. If they continue to present with problems understanding academic arguments beyond FYC, then it is possible that educators are not approaching the subject in a way that encourages students to retain knowledge to carry forward into their disciplinary studies. Haller addresses to some degree the Toulmin method of argumentation when identifying the logos of academic arguments (p. 35). This is perhaps a good place to start addressing the validity of asking FYC students to conduct a rhetorical analysis of visual argument in the form of print ads, televised ads, magazine covers, movie posters, etc. to then compose and produce their own.