Re: students grade themselves

[GILLESPIEP@VMS.CSD.MU.EDU]

On Wed, 3 Jan 1996, Lynne Belcher wrote:

> The upper division writing 
> courses I teach always contain collaborative projects, and students 
> always complain about having to do the work for others.  I'm anxious 
> for some solutions!
> 
> Lynne Belcher
> Southern Arkansas University
> 

Lynne, you've probably tried this, but in the collaborative course I 
taught, I was planning to have students rate one another on the work they 
did, as a sort of safeguard against one person doing it all.  But I could 
see that it wasn't necessary.  There were some who were taking the lead, 
and there were some who were either better writers or who had better 
writing stragegies (heading for the writing center, for example), but 
these students brought the others along to their levels.  I guess that's 
why I wanted to do a collaborative project in the first place, so that 
students could watch the writing processes of others and learn from 
them.  

One group had an esl writer in it, and they really helped and encouraged 
him.  He had outstanding ideas and things to say.  They praised him and 
his work but insisted that the parts he wrote be clear and easy to follow 
and correct.  They didn't take the work out of his hands, but insisted 
that he revise.  I don't know how that happened; it just did.  I just 
happened to observe it.  Then, after he revised, they reworked the entire 
thing as a group.  You'd expect that they would just give him a pass 
during the final proofreading session, but they gave him the draft to 
proof, and he found things, all right, errors in sections he hadn't 
written.  

I think that if the students had been bored or turned off to the project, 
I would have seen more drifting.  But they were all anxious to be heard 
because they were being listened to and their writing was being taken 
very seriously.  

Paula Gillespie