AN INVESTIGATION OF TEACHER COMMENT TECHNIQUES IN THE EVALUATION OF STUDENTS' WRITINGS.

摘要

The purpose of this study was to analyze and describe teachers' comments written on seventh-graders' compositions and to investigate the relative effects of two types of comments on improvement in writing.; Initial data were gathered from nine teachers of seventh-grade English, with data being collected from 180 papers. A taxonomy was developed for the purpose of categorizing and describing comments written on the papers; 1,475 comments were analyzed.; The teacher whose comments were most specific and explicit and the teacher whose comments were least specific and explicit each submitted three additional sets of writing samples during an 8-month period. A team of three rates used holistic scoring procedures to score the first and last papers submitted by each teacher. Interrater reliability coefficients were significant at the.01 level. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique for repeated measures was used to test for relative effects of the two types of comments on improvement in writing performance.; A significant interaction was found between type of comment and occasion of testing. The analysis and post hoc tests revealed that the group receiving more specific and explicit comments demonstrated significantly greater improvement over time than did the group receiving less specific and explicit comments.; Analysis of results seemed to support the follownig conclusions: (1) most comments were written in red, less than 10 words, interlinear, and written as incomplete sentences, (2) the content of the comments was generally neutral in tone, written in plan English or editing symbols, specific, and inexplicit, (3) most comments referred to obvious errors in mechanics and usage found in a single word and marked in the text, (4) improvement in writing performance was sigificantly greater for students receiving more specific and explicit written feedback than for students receiving less specific and explicit comments, and (5) identifying key errors and providing students with sufficient information to make corrections were more effective in helping them to improve writing skills than merely editing or naming mistakes.