How do teachers assess narrative texts? The effects of teachers’ feedback in a Spanish writing class of Primary Education

Author(s):

Fernández María Jesús(presenting / submitting)Lucero Manuel(presenting)Montanero Manuel

Conference:

ECER 2013

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 02 B, Text Writing

Paper Session

Time:

2013-09-10

15:15-16:45

Room:

A-206

Chair:

Brigitte Gruson

Contribution

The written production has received limited attention in research works in comparison with reading comprehension. Despite the progress in the study of the cognitive processes involved in writing, there are few techniques of evaluation of this skill (Cuetos, Ramos & Ruano, 2002). In this context, we wonder: How do primary school teachers’ assess texts? Which criteria do their corrections affect to? What kind of review (deep or shallow) does the teachers’ feedback drive? This research aims to answer these questions. Below, we show the main backgrounds that contextualize the present study.

The relevance of written production

The production of texts is a basic skill for the stages of Primary (article 6 of R.D. 1513/2006, 7^th December) and Secondary Education (article 7 of R.D. 1631/2006, 29^th December) in Spanish educational system. This way, this skill is considered to be as a purpose and an objective (Organic Law of Education, 2006). In addition, it must be worked in a transverse way in all areas of Primary education. Schools are required to spend time every day to write texts due to the psychological and physiological benefits that the writing processes involve (Smyth, 1998). Also, text production allows to achieve learning objectives. So, we believe that it is a relevance skill.

On the other hand, there are different approaches to explain how the writing process takes place (Graham, Gillespie & Mckeown, 2013). According to the explanatory theory of cognitive approach most accepted (Flower & Hayes, 1981), which is integrated by other researchers (Bereiter & Sacardamalia, 1987), a series of mental processes and affective-motivational operations interact in the written production. Those operations need a process of construction of knowledge because they take place simultaneously.

Texts assessment

In the literature about writing, we observe that students realize a text review in two levels (Graham, Mac Arthur, & Schwartz, 1995; Hayes, Flower, Schriver, Stratman, & Carey, 1987): shallow (formal aspects: orthography and grammar) and deep (content aspects: transformation of words, phrases and paragraphs).

In the previously mentioned approaches, the texts editing processes are considered cognitive operations of writing. Even more, the authors say that the skills of planning and review constitute a fundamental part of the writing ability (Piolat, 1991). These two metacognitive skills improve the text structure by means of the achieved self-regulation (Chen, Wei, Wu & Uden, 2009; Schunk & Zimmerman, 2007). This way, there are some instruments that promote self-assessment: rubrics (Jonsson & Svingby, 2007), scripts, prompts and cues (Alonso-Tapia & Panadero, 2010; Bannert, 2009).

Objectives

The present work aims to analyze the assessment of the text generated by the teachers of Primary Education. To this purpose, task review of narrations is applied. This research focuses in two main aspects: a) the impact of teacher feedback in a text review, b) aspects which have changed after review. The obtained results serve as basis to develop a tool for assess the creative writing. Besides, this tool could contribute to their comprehension because of the close link between skills, comprehension and writing (Graham & Hebert, 2011).

Method

Participants were 66 students and 6 teachers of 2nd and 3rd cycle of Primary Education of Extremadura, in Badajoz (Spain). When designing the protocol to develop this experience, teachers’ feedback was defined as independent variable, whereas the dependent variable is the students’ text improvement. To determine this latter value, two students’ stories were punctuated (before and after the review) according to the assessment criteria proposed in two tools for writing: PROESC (Cuetos, Ramos & Ruano, 2002) and a rubric created for this purpose. The reliability of rubric and PROESC was calculated from 14 narrations randomly selected (Kappa Cohen > 0, 85). The procedure was organized around two session of 1 hour each other. During the first one, main concepts were revised and, later, each student had 30 minutes to compose a story (fictional or true) about a proposed topic. At the second session, the students read a narration as a model to improve their texts and, later, the teacher provided oral feedback. Finally, the students wrote their narrations again.

Expected Outcomes

Results using a rubric created for this work and PROESC show that children incorporated a significantly high number of teachers’ feedback about structural aspect such as orthography (rubric: t = -4,623, p<0,05) and grammatical structure (rubric: t = -8,248, p<0,05; PROESC: t = -2,181, p<0,05) in writing tasks. Although, the students were not able to display advanced metacognitive processes and skills to review aspects such as content or coherence of the text. In addition, we counted the changes (negative and positive) that students’ texts experimented after the review according to the assessment criteria proposed in a rubric. This way, we knew that the 86% of students improved their texts through the incorporation of teachers’ feedback in at least an aspect of the rubric. Although, these changes affected to orthography (50 % of students) and grammar structure (31, 8% of writing). This is explained because teachers’ main feedback is focused in these aspects (shallow review).

References

Alonso-Tapia, J., & Panadero, E. (2010). Effect of self-assessment scripts on self-regulation and learning. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 33(3), 385-397. Bannert, M. (2009). Promoting self-regulated learning through prompts. Zeitschrift Fur Padagogische Psychologie, 23(2), 139-145. Chen, N. S., Wei, C. W., Wu, K. T., & Uden, L. (2009). Effects of high level prompts and peer assessment on online learners’ reﬂection levels. Computers & Education, 52, 283–291. Cuetos, F., Ramos, J.L. & Ruano, E. (2002). PROESC: Batería de evaluación de los procesos de escritura. Madrid: TEA Ediciones. Flower, L. & Hayes J. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32 (4), 365-387. Graham, S. & Hebert, M. (2011). Writing-to-read: A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational Review, 81, 710–744. Graham, S. Gillespie, A. & Mckeown, D. (2013). Writing: importance, development, and instruction. Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 26 (1), 1-15. Graham, S., Mac Arthur, C. & Schwartz, S. (1995). Effects of goal setting and procedural facilitation on the revising behavior and writing performance of students with writing and learning problems. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87 (2), 230-240. Hayes, J. R., Flower, L., Schriver, K., Stratman, J., & Carey, L. (1987). Cognitive processes in revision. En S. Rosenberg (Ed.), Reading, writing, and language learning. Advances in applied psycholinguistics, (Vol. 2, pp. 176-240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jonsson A. & Svingby, G. (2007). The Use Of Scoring Rubrics: Reliability, Validity And Educational Consequences, Educational Research Review 2 (2007) 130–144 Piolat, A. (1991). Effect of Word processing on text revision. Language and Education, 5, 255-272. Schunk, D. H., & Zimmerman, B. J. (2007). Influencing children’s self-efficacy and self-regulation of reading and writing through modeling. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 23, 7-25.

Author Information

Fernández María Jesús (presenting / submitting)

Universidad de Extremadura

Ciencias de la Educación

Badajoz

Lucero Manuel (presenting)

Universidad de Extremadura, Spain

Montanero Manuel