Friday, September 19, 2008

Gender and procrastination

My husband asked me if having a male teacher correlated to more procrastination than having a female teacher. Well, beats me. I wasn't particularly interested in gender for this study. All three instructors in my study are male. I don't see any reason to expect that this would be a problem for the study, but I suppose someone could conduct a study to answer my husband's question. I could imagine certain teaching methods that encourage or discourage procrastination might actually correlate somewhat to gender, but it doesn't strike me as something that would make an obvious impact.

He also asked if the gender distribution of the class contributed to the amount of procrastination. Again, beats me. I didn't collect any data about the students' gender. I didn't even ask the students to report their genders on the questionnaires. I haven't tried to guess students' genders in assigning them pseudonyms.

Procrastination and Proofreading

Of the students I studied, procrastinators were half as likely as non-procrastinators to report proofreading. At first glace this seems like a useful statistic, but I'm not entirely sure.

I didn't set up my questionnaire appropriately to actually study this question. I did not ask students whether they had proofread, merely what changes they had made to their papers. It's possible that students proofread but neglected to mention it. For instance, an instructor might have made a point in class about how proofreading could not stand in for more substantial revision. So when asked what changes they made to their papers, students might have felt they should report the changes their instructor liked to hear about, like organization or elaboration.

In order to determine whether a student had proofread their paper, I simply read what changes they reported making to their paper over time. If they said something along the lines of "fixed grammar" or "changed spelling," I counted that as proofreading. One student said he "added some commas," which I decided fell into the category of proofreading. I did not count "sentence structure" as proofreading.

Studying whether procrastinators proofread would properly require another study, preferably one that validated the reports with direct evidence of the students' writing processes. Since I'm only looking at the end product, the amount of surface errors more appropriate to measure. It just doesn't tell as much about the writing process, if that's what you're interested in.

Another concern I have is that students in Matt's class, procrastinators or not, were more than seven times more likely to report proofreading than those in Lee's class. So while procrastination does appear to correlate to proofreading, it isn't the best predictor of my data.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Mort doesn't have much trouble

Mort says he planned his paper for three weeks before drafting it the night before it was due. He says he spent enough time on his paper and when asked if his reasons for waiting a long time to start his paper said, "Don't fix something that is not broken."

Mort's paper was the longest one I studied, 2798 words compared to his class's median of 1465. Where some of his classmates resorted to increasing their font size to make their papers physically larger, Mort seems to be using the Word 2007 default 11-pt. And it's not a string of block quotes making it longer. Instead, he takes on five possible solutions to the problem he poses. And while this doesn't make for the most unified papers, it doesn't immediately suggest procrastination even if it is actually a consequence of putting the paper off to the last minute.

Mort's rate of surface error is in the second quartile. And his problems really do seem often to come from trying out more challenging constructions. For instance, he has a few number agreement problems when the subject is compound and far away from the verb. Mort reports proofreading.

Mort's problems with evidence are also in the second quartile. His only issue is making unsupported claims. This is the kind of thing I'd expect from waiting to the last minute. I know when I'm rushing to finish a paper I often include claims I know need citations to support them but I simply don't have time to find them.

Am I rooting for procrastination?

As I type up my thoughts on the causes of procrastination in these student papers, I wonder if I'm not being open enough to the idea that procrastination is a problem. I seem to explain away everything that might suggest procrastination is harmful. Which is reasonable in that if I do want to suggest procrastination has effects, I need to first rule out other explanations.

But I wonder what I feel as a teacher.

If procrastination accounts for a large proportion of problems in students' papers, what do I do? Do I just force them to turn in drafts and participate in other process-oriented activities? Part of me thinks it's easier to blame procrastination because it's a factor teachers don't have to feel responsible. We remind our students not to put off their assignments, so when they write bad papers at the last minute, it's their own fault.

Bryce has the expected problems

Bryce began planning his paper 16 days before it was due but didn't actually write it until the day before. He felt he spent enough time on it, but perhaps would have benefited from time to "consider what [he has] written."

His paper's length falls in the first quartile. His rate of surface error is in the third quartile, and his problems with evidence are the highest rate in his class. This is pretty much what one would expect from a procrastinator--not enough time to fill the length requirement, to proofread, or to find and effectively use evidence. But so far he's the only procrastinator to fit the stereotype.

Every single one of Bryce's surface errors could be fixed by adding or deleting a comma. They are not the kind of errors he'd be likely to notice in proofreading since he probably isn't quite sure what the rules for comma usage actually are. In fact, Bryce reports that he proofread his paper. He doesn't say what specific kinds of changes he made, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of his errors were introduced as he was proofreading while others were corrected. I don't think procrastination causes students to unlearn punctuation rules, although it might make it harder to apply rules they have to think hard about.

Bryce's top two problems using evidence are weak lead-ins and using quotations where paraphrase would be more appropriate. Bryce mostly introduces his quotations in the sentence before but fails to set them off with signal phrases. As I said before, I doubt that this problem would be fixed with more proofreading. I can't imagine being too rushed to type "X says" and yet having time to explain the relevance of the quote.

Bryce has more trouble using unnecessary quotations than Otis. The fact that he sets off titles of competitions in quotation marks suggests to me that he is sensitive to issues of plagiarism, so he errs on the side of caution. I don't see any reason this fear would be more common in procrastinators, but they could feel it more intensely if they don't believe they have time to put evidence in their own words.

Otis proofreads but struggles using evidence

Otis reports that he began research for his paper a few weeks before it was due but he didn't begin drafting until three days before he turned it in. He says he spent enough time on it because he "didn't feel rushed."

Otis's paper is in the first quartile for length--1192 words to his class's median of 1465. He has the lowest rate of surface errors in his class, but he's in the third quartile for problems with evidence. Otis does report proofreading.

A lack of sentence variety might partially explain Otis's lack of surface errors. But the fact that he tends to have overlong subjects with short verbs suggests to me that he's attempting an academic voice, even if it isn't one that his instructors appreciate. Another explanation is that Otis actually proofread his paper, despite putting it off. I still haven't crunched the numbers to see if procrastination makes one less likely to proofread.

Unlike Mary and Mark, whose evidence problems centered on just a couple areas, Otis has several problems. His top two are no lead-ins for quotations and weak lead-ins for quotations. He only once uses a signal phrase and rarely sets up the quote in the previous sentence. His next most common problems are using quotations where paraphrase would be more appropriate and citing his "own" conclusions. I'm particularly interested in his habit of using quotations instead of paraphrase, because in Otis's class, this problem was much more common among procrastinators than non-procrastinators. (The same is not true for Mark and Mary's class, however.)

When I say that paraphrase would be more appropriate, I'm talking about quoting facts that are worded in unimpressive ways. My feeling is that students do this because they find paraphrase difficult or intimidating. Perhaps the original quote was difficult for the student to understand, so they couldn't put it in their own words. Or the student has been warned about the problem of paraphrasing incompletely, risking charges of plagiarism, so they simply resort to quotations to avoid that problem.

It's possible that spending more time on his paper would have helped Otis introduce his quotations better (as with Mary), but it seems unlikely that it would have prevented his dropped quotes (as with Mark). I could also imagine that spending more time would have helped him write more paraphrases, but that seems like a reach. He had plenty of evidence, he just didn't use it very well. Practice might help, but just writing for longer probably wouldn't have.

Monday, September 15, 2008

"Mary"'s paper pretty average

"Mary" reports that she'd been planning her paper for a few weeks before she actually drafted it three days before it was due. She says she "rewrote" the final draft because of computer problems, but it's not entirely clear whether she means that she had to start over or whether she merely had to retype it from an earlier printed draft. She doesn't think she spent enough time on it, mostly because of the computer problems she had at the last minute.

Mary's paper is right at the average for her class. Her rate of surface errors is in the first quartile. She's not writing grade-school level sentences, but she could use more sentence-level transitions. She'd probably run into more errors if she were writing more complex sentences, but she's not clearly avoiding challenges either. She didn't report proofreading.

Mary's rate of problems with evidence is the median for her class. Her top two problems rank one and three among non-procrastinators: weak lead-ins for quotations and lack of follow-ups. Where Mark's quotations fit clearly in the context of the paragraph but lacked signal phrases, Mary's quotations have signal phrases but neglect any explanation of how they fit in the paragraph. She's learned the rule against dropping quotations in, but she still doesn't really use her evidence, she just tosses it in and puts "According to X" in front of it. But she doesn't really do this more than her non-procrastinating peers.

If she'd spent more time on her paper, she might have been more able to explain the relevance of her quotations. I know that when I'm rushing to finish a paper, it's usually my explanations that suffer. I find myself hoping the reader knows where I'm going with my point. But it's also possible that Mary would not have noticed this problem in her paper, since she already understood the point she was trying to make and might not have realized that someone else wouldn't follow.

"Mark" has few mechanical errors, but struggles with evidence

Now that I've gotten a feel for the general differences between the procrastinated and non-procrastinated papers I collected, I'm going back over the procrastinated ones to better understand what's going on there. Here's what I've learned about "Mark"'s paper.

Mark reports that he wrote his research paper two days before it was due and then rewrote the whole thing one day before it was due. He says he put it off so long because he's "lazy," but he feels he spent enough time on it anyway.

He's right at the average length for the papers in his class and has rate of surface errors in the first quartile. And his sentence structure seems reasonable for a FYC class with pretty frequent subordination. So his lack of error isn't obviously caused by avoiding challenges. He didn't report doing any proofreading.

On the other hand, his rate of problems with evidence is the highest in his class. His top two problems are weak lead-ins for quotations and unsupported claims. (These are the top two problems for non-procrastinators in his class as well.) In Mark's case, most of his quotations are "dropped in" without signal phrases, but they do logically follow the sentences before them. He also relies completely on secondary sources about a comic book character, never directly citing the comics themselves.

It's hard to say whether starting his paper a few days sooner would have helped Mark. It might have given him more time to look up sources for some of the claims he wanted to make. But it probably wouldn't have prevented his dropped quotes. In my experience teaching and tutoring, people who drop quotes simply don't understand that it's a no-no--even after multiple one-on-one sessions intending to explain it. Unless he used those extra days to take his paper to the writing center or conference with his instructor, Mark probably wouldn't have fixed those dropped quotes because he probably didn't think they needed fixing.