Week 4

Although I began this week thinking it was going to be a short one, the reality is that for most classes we had our full complement of two meetings. The main focus this week has been on ascertaining how well students have understood the text they read as homework. I myself and still trying to figure out the difficulties that first year students have with reading. To this end I carried out a number of experiments. I got all 3 classes to complete a quiz. The questions were purely checking reading for literal meaning – no inferences or evaluation were required in order to complete it. Many of the answers required just a single word and others just required students to quote from the text. One class was instructed to do the quiz, first as closed book and then after they had done their best with the book closed, they were allowed to redo the quiz as open book. There was one instance of a student getting a higher grade on the closed book version. All quizzes were peer graded and one class I got to redo the quiz even after we had agreed on the right answers. I did this because I found that with the peer grading some students had marked answers correct that were clearly wrong. Consistently, (even when the quiz was redone after grading) the majority of students received a failing grade.

This is of course all very demoralizing for both students and me. In a sense this is exactly what I was expecting to happen and I actually told students this even before they did the quiz. I was hoping that they would prove my expectations wrong. I could avoid giving such quizzes but what would be the value in that? Students and teacher could then convince themselves that texts are being read and understood but what if in reality students don’t understand what they are reading or perhaps worse – they misunderstand what they are reading. At least if you know you don’t know something there’s some hope that you might go off and learn it – or you certainly won’t act as if you know. If one can convince oneself that they understand a text then no further action is required. However, if one admits that one does not understand, one feels obliged to do something but what is it that one should do? Hopefully the skills acquired by students on this course will equip them to deal with texts they don’t fully understand.

From looking at students’ work this week I can identify that one of the major problems is lack of attention to detail and lack of sensitivity to accuracy. Again there were many spelling mistakes and inaccurate quotations although students could have consulted their books for the correct versions. Philosopher or psychologist – does it matter? Does it matter whether one uses Turkish spelling or English spelling? Students seem to think that if their answer is somewhere “in the ballpark” then that’s OK. In the next few months they will have to realize that details are important in academic writing. Students must learn that there is a big difference between saying “this relationship is mediated through computer communication” and “this relationship is mainly mediated through computer communication”.

The second lesson of the week consisted mainly in students creating a synthesized list of points from the text, arranged under headings provided by me. They seem to have worked very well together and have come up with quite a comprehensive list. It may be a bit early in the course to get them synthesizing but it fits in naturally with what we need to do now. Having synthesized information within one text they should better understand the process involved in synthesizing a number of texts later. It was interesting to see how different people can read a text and isolate different points. While I monitored group work I noticed that one student had noted that masturbation offline tends to be solitary whereas masturbation online is a social activity – a point dealt with in the text but one that had not struck me until she expressed it in such blunt terms.