Sara B's List: sarapomgranate's education links

• I have found that audio comments save time, provide more extensive feedback, and offer a more personal classroom than text-based comments do. In addition, giving feedback through an audio method helps prevent physical injury to instructors, a concern that will only increase as online teaching becomes more popular.

  • BENEFITS
• Third, as is apparent from the comments above, audio comments enrich an online classroom in a way that text-based comments cannot. Hearing the instructor's voice makes the online classroom much more personal. Even the tone of voice one can use affects students’ perceptions of possibly critical comments. Text-based comments often "sound" terse when read by students; with audio comments, the instructor can qualify his/her language, adjust volume, use pregnant pauses, etc. in offering the student feedback on concerns in a paper. These dynamics help to communicate the problems in a student's writing with care and empathy.

  • Dynamic as opposed to "terse."

• 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.

  • These are the factors that prompted a change in the method of feedback.
• 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.

  • Feedback is received positively and leads to more substantive revision.
• 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.

  • BENEFITS
• 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.

  • Describes the nature, depth, breadth and delivery of audio comments.
• 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.

  • Students report:
    1) praised more thoroughly
    2) understand comments more accurately
• 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.

  • Specific comments result in holistic change.
• 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."

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