I agree that, if we want students to do something with our feedback, we need to hold them accountable for doing so. Some sort of built-in need/requirement to use feedback (to revise an assignment, to complete a reflection activity, etc) is the most successful way I've found to have students really engage. On the flip side, providing students with time and space to think about and use feedback is also needed - I think too often students feel they are rushing to move on to the next unit/assignment, and don't have time to do the reflection that leads to deeper learning. And I think that's a structural/big-picture problem more than a student motivation problem.
I take this seriously and have been involved in establishing two undergraduate research journals. One is aligned with the Eastern meetings in my profession and has been in operation for over 20 years. I require a paper or more in all upper-level courses.
I use a three-stage process. (1) Thesis, Broad Outline, Broad Bibliography. (2) then they get 2-3 Weeks to develop their "Best FInal Draft", I provide extensive feedback (3) another 2 weeks and the final paper is due. This worked quite well for the first 1/3 of my career (30 year career, thus far). Smaller liberal arts college, decent class sizes, decently prepared students for the most part.
In the second third of may career (new state university, a lot of first-generation college students). the writing was bimodal in the extreme. A lot of work, but I felt like the upper tail got a lot out of it. On the other side of the distribution more and more students simply addressed the "corrections" to their "best draft" and for that expected an "A". Or, the "best draft" was their first draft. (I eventually stopped reading papers that were clearly first drafts. I told them they blew their chance and they were on their own. That got into the grapevine and it helped. However, the overall slide was clear.
Last ten years. I moved to a better state "flagship" school. Now I have dropped Stage (2) of the writing process. It is just too depressing that so many good students do not know the rudiments of writing. The failure is trickling up and I cannot attend to both the content of a college course and the rudiments or writing not gained in 12 years in "school". I am left wondering what do they do all day? Whatever it is, it certainly is not the reading, writing, and arithmetic.
This is great!
Could we just could stop making continual excuses for them and actually hold them accountable?
I agree that, if we want students to do something with our feedback, we need to hold them accountable for doing so. Some sort of built-in need/requirement to use feedback (to revise an assignment, to complete a reflection activity, etc) is the most successful way I've found to have students really engage. On the flip side, providing students with time and space to think about and use feedback is also needed - I think too often students feel they are rushing to move on to the next unit/assignment, and don't have time to do the reflection that leads to deeper learning. And I think that's a structural/big-picture problem more than a student motivation problem.
I take this seriously and have been involved in establishing two undergraduate research journals. One is aligned with the Eastern meetings in my profession and has been in operation for over 20 years. I require a paper or more in all upper-level courses.
I use a three-stage process. (1) Thesis, Broad Outline, Broad Bibliography. (2) then they get 2-3 Weeks to develop their "Best FInal Draft", I provide extensive feedback (3) another 2 weeks and the final paper is due. This worked quite well for the first 1/3 of my career (30 year career, thus far). Smaller liberal arts college, decent class sizes, decently prepared students for the most part.
In the second third of may career (new state university, a lot of first-generation college students). the writing was bimodal in the extreme. A lot of work, but I felt like the upper tail got a lot out of it. On the other side of the distribution more and more students simply addressed the "corrections" to their "best draft" and for that expected an "A". Or, the "best draft" was their first draft. (I eventually stopped reading papers that were clearly first drafts. I told them they blew their chance and they were on their own. That got into the grapevine and it helped. However, the overall slide was clear.
Last ten years. I moved to a better state "flagship" school. Now I have dropped Stage (2) of the writing process. It is just too depressing that so many good students do not know the rudiments of writing. The failure is trickling up and I cannot attend to both the content of a college course and the rudiments or writing not gained in 12 years in "school". I am left wondering what do they do all day? Whatever it is, it certainly is not the reading, writing, and arithmetic.