Digitized Audio Commentary in First Year Writing Classes | Academic Commons - The Diigo Meta page

• 24 Feb 09
  

  Sara B

  Another article about using audio comments to respond to student writing. I find the bibliography here especially useful.

  digitized audio comments writing response feedback research k-12 education useful

  • My
    frustration with the time and space limitations of handwritten
    instructor commentary, combined with a sense that students sometimes
    ignore or misinterpret feedback delivered via this method, led me to
    experiment with audio commentary, beginning in 1990.
  • The results have
    convinced me that audio instructor commentary on student writing is
    received more positively by college composition students and leads them
    toward more substantive revision of their essays.
  • 7 more annotations...
  • • This
      easy-to-learn method offers instructors the opportunity to provide
      students with the kind of detailed, expansive response to their work
      that might only be available in frequently difficult to schedule
      one-on-one conferences.
    • My audio comments, on average, are approximately ten minutes
      in length per student essay. Ten minutes of spoken feedback allows me
      to do several things I simply cannot do in the margins and endnotes of
      a student's paper in that same amount of time: continue and
      individualize classroom instruction to help the student understand
      problems in the paper--issues like content development, focus,
      argumentation, or writing errors. In addition, the added space allows
      for more specificity: I can offer students concrete suggestions and
      occasional examples concerning how they might improve portions of the
      paper in revision; I can elaborate on the things they do well so that
      they are better able to recognize successes and repeat them in the
      future. This added detail, specificity, and length, in turn, not only
      provides students with more extensive feedback, but clearer feedback,
      as well. Furthermore, the fact that audio commentary is closer in style
      to conversation than handwritten allows the instructor to adopt a more
      relaxed approach to the student audience, thus making this method more
      enjoyable for the instructor and better received and more highly valued
      by most students.
    • Anson, Chris. "In Our Own Voices: Using Recorded Commentary to Respond to Writing." Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines. Eds. Mary Deane Sorcinelli and Peter Elbow. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997. 105-113.
    • I found that student
      preference for audio commentary was predicated on their belief that
      they were praised more fully in audio, remembered teacher commentary
      better and longer, were given more detailed feedback, and understood
      comments more accurately than they did when they received handwritten
      responses.
    • In
      interviews with the ten students whose revisions I analyzed, it became
      clear that in 90% of the cases, the expansive aspects of audio
      commentary allowed them to understand the holistic nature of the
      feedback better: in other words, the ways that individual comments
      related to the entire paper.
    • In my study, student papers revised using handwritten
      commentary suggested that margin notes were read as completely
      localized, applying only to the sentence closest to the comment. In
      addition, study participants reported that global endnotes were often
      left unread.
    • Conversely, the more inherently global nature of audio
      commentary--the way it allows a professor to quickly suggest how
      developing one section, for instance, requires development of several
      other sections--helps students understand the relationship between
      smaller, text-specific comments and the larger holistic issues required
      in revision. Ultimately, student attitudes and learning outcomes might
      be best summed up by this study participant, who commented, "When I got stuck I could just replay my CD and somehow listening not reading…made it easier for me to get refocused. I wish all Profs. used audio comments."
• 17 May 08
  

  Joan Vinall-Cox

  feedbackbymp3 audio mp3

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