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Please help!! Use You Can Lead a Horse to Water but You Can't Make Him Edit: Varied Effects of Feedback on Grammar Across Upper-Division Business
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suggests that a lack of condence in one's ability to succeed may have an impact on his or her ability to improve. In social cognitive theory, three elements interact to facilitate learning: self-efcacy, feedback, and environmental support. Students who have self-efcacy toward a behavior, get appropriate feedback when dem- onstrating behavior, and receive environmental support are more likely to learn. Students may avoid incorporating feedback into a subsequent assignment if they feel that they lack the ability to respond to the feedback or if they do not have sufcient environmental support. Thus, it is important that even students who feel self-efcacy with regard to grammar issues have appropriate support materials to aid them in editing for grammar mistakes if they are to respond to written feedback on subsequent submissions. Price et a1. [2011] suggests that access to a writing center with writing tutors is one way to make business students feel more supported as they adjust to the more difcult task of writing in upper-division business classes. Other ways to provide support are to give students in-class review and access to out-of-class materials that explain grammar rules. In sum- mary, previous research supports the following hypothesis. In summary, previous research supports the following hypothesis. HI:Wherestudentshavecondeneeintheirgiammarsldlls,aregi-ade mcvamandhave aceesstoadditional environmmtalsupportinbasic wdtingmechanics,speeicwrittenhdbeekongrammsrenorswilldecresse dieerrorratemndrnstoanalsubmission. METHODOLOGY Pretreatment Assessment of Student Condence, Attitudes, Behaviors, and Writing Experience In order to assess the previous writing experience, attitudes, and writing behaviors of the subject population, an anonymous survey was administered at the beginning of three separate principles of marketing courses conducted over two quarters at a rural, western university. A total of 71 usable surveys were returned out of a total population of 96 for a response rate of 74%. In the survey, students were asked to respond to statem-ts on their attitudes about their writing skills on a Likert scale (1 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = disagree, and 5 = strongly disagree) and to provide dernoyaphie data, as well as data about the amount of writing that they had done in previous college courses. There were no signicant demographic differences found among the classes. All students were business majors and college juniors or seniors. Eighty-ve percent were ages 20 to 25, with the rest being older than 25. Fifty-eight percent were male and 42 percent were female. A clear majority of students (85 percent) transferred to the university as juniors. All of the results in Table l were consistent across major and demographics. 184 Journal of the Academy of Business Education Table 1. Student Attitudes and Behaviors about Writing Statement Mean' Standard Deviation 1. Iaincondentinmy abilitytowrite 2.10 0.99 sentences with wrrect grammar. 2. Ind it difculttobe clear inmy writing. 3.52 1.11 3. I feel condent in my ability to defend my 230 1.05 point of view in writing. 4. A difcult part of writing sentences is 3.27 1.22 knowing the right words to use. 5. Ifeelconiidentinmy abilityto use section 2.75 1.18 headings in my writing. 6. IwishIhadbeenforoedtodomorewriting 3,29 1.29 in myprevious years of education. 7. I tend to write inuapers in one sitting. 2.60 1.28 8. The hardest part ofwrln'ng is getting 227 1.13 starwd. 9.Ifastiidentgetsabadgradeonapaperin 3.48 124 college, most instructors will allow the studmt tnrevirritethepaper forahetter grade. '(l = strongly agree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 5 = strongly disagree). Generally, students felt neutral to condent in their writing skills. They expressed the highest condence in their grammar skills, as statement 1 in Table 1 had the strongest support and the lowest standard deviation. Seventy-two percent of students at least agreed with statement 1, and only 9 percent disagreed with that statement at all. Students also tended to agree that they wrote their papers in one sitting and they had a hard time getting started writing Fifty-three and sixty-ve percent of students, respectively, at least agreed with those state- ments. The majority of students were not counting on being able to rewrite papers for a better grade. Fiy-ve percent at least disagreed with statement 9. Statements 4 and 8 were weakly positively correlated (r = 0.254, p-vslue = 0.035). There are no other signicant correlations betwe- writing attitudes in statements 1 through 6 and statements 7, 8, or 9. The weak, positive correlation between the difculty in starting writing and the tendency to write papers in one sitting may indicate that the former is a possible contributing factor to the latter as students are forced to write papers in one sitting as a deadline approaches. The results also suggest that students' condence in their ability to write with good grammar was high. The students felt more positively about this aspect of their writing than any other. This demonstrates that the population was likely to have high self-efcacy when correcting basic errors in writing mechanics. In addition, students were not counting on getting an opportunity to rewrite a paper Spring 2019 135 for a better grade. This implies that a nal submission grade for which writing was at least 5 percent of the grade would likely sufce as a strong enough incentive for this population based on Bacon and Anderson's [2004] research The mean number of individual papers that students had written in previous college courses that were at least ve pages in length was 5.6 (standard devia- tion = 4.040). One-third of the respondents had individually written less than three papers of at least ve pages in length in college. Fifteen percent reported that they had written individually no papers of at least ve pages in length. 0n the other hand, one-third of students reported that they had written at least 10 papers of that length individually in college. The mean number of classes in which students had the option of submitting dras for instructor feedback was 2.46. Fieen students (21 percent) reported never having had any class in college in which they had the ability to submit dras for instructor feedback. The mean number of classes in which strident: were requiredto turn in paper drafts for instructor feedback was 1.25. All students in this sample were required to take and pass at least two courses in freshmen composition. The mean number of classes in which students were required to turn in a dra was less than 2, and the mean number of classes in which they had the option of submitting dras was slightly more than 2, which suggests that a majority of students had little exposure to the use of dras in their academic writing This lack of experience, combined with the fact that most students tended to write papers in one sitting, suggests that students were not following an informal drafting system by themselves. This supports the idea that a formal draing system would provide a structure for revision that they are not providing for themselves. In summary, these results demonstrate that this population of students has self-efcacy in grammar, would be motivated when writing is at least 5 percent of a written assignment's grade, and has had little exposure to the process of drsing in their academic experience. An examination of the effects of drafting on the rate of student errors in subsequent assignments follows. Drafting and Student Writing Error Rates The 96 students previously surveyed were involved in a quasiexperim-tal design to examine the effect of draing on basic student writing errors. Each student was required to complete two applied writing assignments based on major concepts in marketing. Each assignment was limited to two pages in length and was worth 15 percent of their nal course grade. Writing mechanics were evaluated in each assignment and valued at 20 percent of the assignments grade. There is a long list of grammar mistakes that can be made in English Connors and Lunsford [1988] found 54 general categories of errors in their examination of 300 student papers. In order to focus on those that would be most benecial to students in their careers, ve general categories of errors that are usually not captured by computerized spelling and grammar checks were selected. All of 186 Journal of the Academy nfBusinzss Education these categories were among the top nine listed by Connors and Lunsford [1988]. The categories of errors were as follows: 1. Homophone errm'sErmrs of this type happen wh- students use an incorrect word that sounds the same but is spelled differently. Examples of errors of this type are incorrect usages of \"to," \"too," and \"two" or \"schools" versus \"school's". 2. Misspelled word errors that correctly spell another wordAn example of this is when a student uses the word \"roll\" for the word \"role" incorrectly. 3. Sentence fragment errorsErrors of this type occur when sentences do not reect a complete thought. 4. Comma splice errorsThis happens when two independent clauses are combined together with only a comma. 5. Comma with coordinating conjunction errorErrors of this type occur when long independent clauses are combined with a simple conjunction and without a comma. Students were allowed to submit up to two dras per written assignment. Students were required to submit their dras at least 48 hours before the assign- ment was due and received feedback on their dras within 24 hours. Both the (truth and the feedback were given through a learning management system. The course instructor gave all the feedback on content, and a professional editor gave all the feedback on writing errors. At the end of each submitted draft, students were told how many errors of each of the above types existed in their dra, but they were not told where in the dra those errors were made. The choice was made to use this type of feedback in order to more closely replicate the editing process that the students would need to undertake on the job. In addition to feedback on these errors, students received written feedback on content. Students were given a 15-minute review of the types of grammar errors that they would be required to nd and fix for themselves in class a week before the rst writing assignment was due. They also had access to an online grammar resource and a free tan-campus writing center with writing tutors for additional help. RESULT S First Writing Assignment For the rst assignment, all students had the option of submitting up to two drafts to the instructor for feedback on both writing skills and content. Seventy- two (75 percent) of 96 students submitted at least one draft, while 18 (19 percent) submitted two dras. It took the professional editor an average of 6.25 minutes to give feedback about the basic writing error categories on each dra. The drss averaged 565 words in length. The number of errors in each of the ve categories mentioned above was recorded and totaled for all dras and the nal submission. Spring 2019 197 \fTable 6. Student Basic Writing Errors Fixed between Drafts and Final Submission in Second Writing Assignment Percentage of Students Overall One Draft Two Drafts All errors (100%) noted in dras xed 52% 43% 66% Most errors (50-99%) nomd in dras xed 19% 21% 17% Some errors (149%) noted in drns xed 6% 10% 0% No errors (0%) noted in dras xed 23% 26% 17% among the groups eligible for draing (F(2, 63) = 5976, p-value = 0.004). A Tnkey post-hoe test revealed that the mean writing error rate for doing two dras was statistically signicantly lower than doing no drafts (p-vslue = 0.005) or doing one dra (p-value = 0.011). There was no statistically signicant result between the groups doing no dras and those doing one dra (p-value = 1.000). This result provides limimd support for H1. Compared to the rst writing assignment, a higher percentage of students in all categories xed the basic writing errors noted in their dras (N = 30), as shown in Table 6. In this case, only 23 percent of students overall did not x any of the errors noted in their dras. Table 7 shows the Spearman rank-order correlations between the different levels of error correction shown in Table 6 and a number of other variables. As in the rst writing assignment a strong negative correlation was found between the different levels of error correction and the number of errors per word in the second assignment (r,(28) = 0.712,pvalue = 0.000). A weak positive corre- lation occurred between the amber of dras done in the second assignment and the level of error correction in the second assignment (r,(28) = 0.384, p-value = 0.036). A moderate positive correlation was found between the number of dras done intherstassignmentandthe levelofertorconecon'omdrasto nal submission in the second assignment (r_(28) = 0.491, p-vslue = 0.006). DISCUSSION The quasiexperimentsl design of this research should have predisposed the results to support the hypothesis that written feedback on specic basic writing errors in dras would lead to a lower rate of those errors in the nal version. The wst majority of students were condent in their ability to write with good grammar, so they should have felt capable to x the errors. While students were not told exactly where their writing errors were, they were given plenty of free, easily accessible resumes to get help to nd and x their errors, and as the assignment was limited to two pages, it was not an overwhelming task. They were motivated to pay attention to these errors by making writing worth 20 percent of 190 Journal of the Academy of Business Education Table 7. Spearnun Rank-Order Correlations of Table 6 Levels of Error Correction Correlation with Table 6 Categories Number of words in second assignment 0.218 Writing errors per word in second assignment 0.675' Number of dras done in second assignment 0.384\" Gender 0.096 Final grade in class 0.914 Writing errors per word in rst assignment 0.085 Number of dras done in rst assignment 0.491' 'Correlson is signicant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed). "Correlation is signicant at the 0.05 level (two-tailed). the grade in the assignment. This was a much higher percentage than previous research had found to be efcacious. Students were given the option of submitting a dra but were not required to do so. This selection option should have biased the results in favor of supporting H1. Presumably, students who went to the trouble of composing a dra were already motivswd to want to get feedback and incorporate it into their nal submission. Indeed, if the results had shown that statistically signicant improvement in the noted writing errors was made be- tween drns and the nal version, it would not have been surprising. Instead, the results showed that only students on the second writing assignment who submitted two dras showed signicant improvement in error rates. Consistent with Crisp [2007], H1 was shown to have limited support. In both assignments, a substantial number of students who did only one diatt failed to x any of the noted writing errors. Given that the students' condence in their grammar skills was high to begin with, they may have been lulled into the expectation that they had good writing skills and neglected to pay attention to information that contradicted this belief in the rst writing assignment. Other students may not have paid attention to the high value placed on good writing mechanics in the evaluation of the rst assignment. However, this does not completely explain the results of the second writing assignment. A necessary, but not sufcient, condition for getting an \"A\" on the rst assignment was to have good basic writing skills. Students who did not meet this standard were the only ones eligible to subunit dras for the second written assignment, Thus, these students should have been even more strongly motiwmd to improve their writing on the second assignment since they had already received feedback that writing was important in the grading of their nal submission. Substantially more errors were xed in all categories in Table 4. Yet, even in the second writing assignment, 26 percent of students who did one dra did not x any noted errors at all. Spring 2015 191 A possible explanation for this effect is that even though most students expressed condence in their writing abilities, the difculty in responding to both content and basic writing issues in the draing Inocess may have caused cognitive overload. Kellogg and Whiteford [2009] explain that \"revision is constrained or even nonexistent in developing writers because of working memory.\" There was a strong negative correlation between the number of errors and the levels of errors xed on both assignments. The more errors that the students had to x, the less likely they were to get all the errors xed. If students were overwhelmed with responding to the content issues in their dras, then they may not have had the cognitive capacity to address basic writing errors as well. This effect would be even more pronounced for students whose belief in their writing abilities did not match their actual abilities. Ifstudents struggle with sentence generation to begin with and then have to apply discipline-rem content on top of that, they are more likely to be incapable of responding to formative feedback, however specic it may be. Writing, like athletics and nuisic, takes practice, and more complex tasks require a mastery of the basics. There is a danger of overcorrecting when giving feedback in writing [Shintani et al., 2013], but in this case students were given feedback on only ve different types of basic writing mistakes. The students had all been exposed to these grammar issues in previous coursework. It is unlikely that overcorrecting was the problem here. The survey data on previous writing experience seem to suggest a. different source of possible overload. As juniors and seniors in college, one-third of these students had written less than three papers of at least ve pages in length. Fifteen percent reported writing no papers of this length individually. Quible and Griffen [2007] also note that, in the past 25 years, English teachers have increasingly stopped providing sentence-level correction and grammar instruction. This implies that a large percentage of these students have had little practice in transforming knowledge into applied compositions to begin with and have not been as exposed to sentence-level error correction as in generations past. Asking students to use feedback to improve grammar in addition to responding to content issues may have been more than some students were capable of handling given their past educational experience. Another source for a possible explanation of the variance of our results comes from studies on millennials and management Our study concentrates on largely millennial-aged cohorts (i.e., students born between 1980 and 2000). Millennials are described as having a strong need for Mdback on their performance [Meister and Willyerd, 2010], but Alexander and Sysko [2012] hold that an environment of abundance and shifts in parenting styles have led this generation to have expectaons of a future with more abundance, even when missing performance expectations. Compared to other generations, they tend to be optimistic and condent in themselves and their abilities Blaine, 2008]. This generational tendency is a reection of the positive psychology movement that emerged in the 19905. In this movement, psychologists advocated an attributional style that explains positive events as a reection of personal and permanent causes, while 192 Journal of the Academy nfBusinzss Education negative events should be seen as external andtemporsry [Seligrnan 1991]. Thus, arecurringthemeintheliteramre ofthemillennialgenerationistheuse of fundamental amihutional error (FAE). FAB is the tendency for individuals to attribute their own success to their own internal characteristics and their failures to external phenomena, while conversely seeing others' successes as conse- quences of external phenomena and their failures due to characteristics of the actor [Ross, 1977]. This bias makes it more difcult for some millennial students to respond to negative feedback. Like educators, managers have long observed variations in an individual's willingness and ability to accept feedback on his or her performance. Silverman et a1. [2005]'s research suggested that awareness was the most important precur- sor to utilizing feedback Awareness means both knowing the existence of a problem and being able to accurately attribute the cause of the problem. An inability to attribute the cause of the problem correctly will lower a person's ability to use feedback. Nlillennial strident: who are yvm a higher level of criticism than they were expecting will be faced with feedback that is inconsistent to their sense of self. Not only are they less able to appraise the magnitude of their deviation from the expected standard, the inconsistency is also contrary to their overestimated sense of efcacy. Unwilling to endure the potential cognitive difculty and preferring to avoid the emotional labor of investigating the depth of their problems, they will resort to externalizing the errors and undervalue the use of feedback to avoid future mistakes. Millennial students who have incorporated the optimism of mdamental attribution error into their psychological makeup will thus demonstrate a stronger tendency to ignore the negative feedka that they are given on a dra, as they see it as an external, short-term problem that they do not have to address. 0n the other hand, students who receive feedback consistent with their sense of self will incorporate this information into better performance. They will have the insight to respond to the feedback in their future work and will be able to absorb the .otional and cognitive distress involved in making changes, given that re changes needed are relatively modest The strong negative correlation between the error rate per word and the level of error correction in both assignments provides support for this explanation. A nal explanation for the variation in response to written feedback on grammar is that repeated exposure over time to a drar'ng system was necessary to increase the level of error correction. Although the number of dras in the rst writing assignment was not correlated with the levels of error correction in the rst assignmeng by the second writing assignment there was a signicant, albeit weak, positive correlation between the number of drns and the level of error correction. There was a stronger positive association between the number of dras done in the rst writing assignment and the level of error correction in the second writing assignment These results tend to support the notion that students were learning to respond to the feedback and correct their grammar mistakes as they had more exposure to a draing system. The study suggests that more than one Spring 2019 193 exposure to drsing is necessary to see signicant effects of written feedback on grammar. Ifmillennial generational tendencies are pervasive in a student body, then it may be that repeated exposure to negative feedback on grammar helps to break through FAE. Crisp [2007, p. 572] notes that \". . . there is an implicit assumption that the provision of feedback will necessarily lead to improvements in subsequent pieces of submiwed work." Faculty should give written feedback on grammar with the knowledge that it will not necessarily result in lower error rates in subsequent assignments unless they are prepared for a substantial time commitment. In this study, providing feedback on just ve basic writing errors over two dras took a professional editor approximately two minutes per 100 written words. This is roughly in line with the estimation of 10 minutes per 100 words that Connors and Lunsford [1988] gave whenthey had a group of college English teachers count 20 different errors over 3,000 papers. Thus, to give even a limited amount of writing feedback for a one-page, double-spaced written assignment of approximame 250 words would require at least five minutes. For a class size of 25 students, that is more than two hours of work for each round of dras. This research suggests that even when students are highly motivated, it takes two rounds of dras over two assignments before the writing error rate drops signicantly on the nal submis- sion. That is eight hours of grading for a one-page assignment before faculty even get to grade a nal submission. The eight-hour estimate is a conservative one because most upper-division faculty members are not professional editors. A faculty member without an editing background would be expected to spend even more time on the task. It may be more reasonable to spread out these efforts over a number of courses and instructors to distribute this burden more evenly. RECOMMENDATIONS Recommendations for Future Research This research was conducted in one upper-division principles of marketing class. It would be benecial to see if these same results were found over mrrltiple frmotional areas of business. Also, only ve different types of basic writing errors were examined in this study. Connors and Lunsford [1988] identify 54 types of basic writing errors in their analysis. It may be that the results in this study are a function of the errors studied. Future research that includes a broader range of basic writing errors may yield different results. Another limitation of this study was that it did not test the students prociency in correcting basic writing errors prior to the treatment. Linking prociency to nal results would determine if the limited success of written feedback in drafting is because students lack the ability to x the writing errors noted in a draft. While this study found limited support for H1, it is only a pilot study. The number of students in the study restricted the analysis that could be done. It may be that a bigger sample with a coordinated plan of drafting and written feedback over a series of upper-division classes would 194 Journal of the Academy nfBusinzss Education yield a better result. Related research into the use of peer review [Stellmack et a1., 2012] and automamd editing practices [Bacon et 81., 2008] in conjunction with draingmayyielduserlwaysto cutdownonthenumberofhours ofrcultytime requiredtogivewrimen feedback Additionalresearchintlrese areas wouldbehelprl. Recommendations for Practice In the right circumstances, a multidra system was found to be effective at reducing grammar error rates in the nal submission. It is apparent that some students respond well to written feedback when it comes to grammar issues. This study seems to suggest that this group becomes a larger percentage of students when they are motivamd and submit an increasing number of dras. There were always some students who completely avoided responding to the written feedback on grammar. Despite grade motivation and resource availability, these students did not appear to act on this feedback at all. The research suggests that increasing students' response to written feedback on grammar requires the commitment of faculty to give specic, regular, and formative feedback over time. This is a daunting task for many college faculty. Virtually all of the research on written feedback cites the time required to provide it and the resource constraints faced by college faculty. Kellogg and Whiteford [2009, p 260] state, \"Although there are probably many reasons why more writing is not routinely assigned, the time and effort required by instructors to provide useful feedback surely tanks high on the list.\" In a survey of business professors, the amount of time spent on grading was ranked rst among draw- backs to having increased written assignments [Parent et al., 2011]. In addition, 'Improving undergraduate writing skills receives relatively meager rewards com- pared with faculty publication, mentoring of graduate students, and sponsored researc " [Kellogg and Whiteford, p. 261]. Finally, there is always the consider- ation that faculty members are subject to the students' evaluation of their instruc- tion. Students are not hikely to complain about an instructor who is not picky enough about grammar. Given the low level of rewards and the enormous investment of time, it is not surprising that individual faculty members reduce the length and number of written assignments, much less so through the increased hassle of reviewing dras. Administrators in higher education should consider changingtherewsrd systemifitwantsits reultymembersto committo improving student writing and give this level ofwritten We]; REFERENCES Achieve. (2015). \"2014 Annual Report on the Alignment of State K12 Policies and Practice with the Demands of College and Careers,\" Retrieved from http://www.achieve.org/les/Achieve-ClosingExpectGap2014%20Feb5. pdf. Spring 2019 195Step by Step Solution
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