Bradley Bleck’s Intervention
Students are were given a several essays to annotate, but with a particular strategy to annotate for re-statement. The focus of the readings are college level essays, scoring at the 12th grade reading level and higher. Students are provided some reading strategies, primarily previewing and annotating.
Student were asked to read and annotate a relatively short academic text, John Edlund’s “Three Ways to Persuade.” What students did was the baseline with regard to their reading and annotating skills and strategies. Students were also evaluated in terms of the numbers and length of highlighting. This took place early in the 10-week quarter system with students in both college level writing classes, English 101, and students in English 99, the last level of developmental writing. Students read and annotated several more essay through the course of the quarter, with decreasing levels of support. For the final writing assignment of the class, their Portfolio Cover Letter, students were given the first several pages of Ed White’s Portfolios 2.0 to read and annotate and to use as a guide for their cover letter. These annotations were evaluated in relation to the first set of annotations.
The intervention was to give students a reading strategy for previewing, reading and responding to the text. For this assessment students were asked to engage in restatement annotations only to see whether they were getting the gist of the essay. Students were asked to respond to what they read in their essays but that was not part of the project’s focus.
Went with essays from scholarly publications that were above the 12th grade reading level. Building on the focus that if students engage the reading initially and annotate for meaning and understanding, that when they need to come back to the text they need not re-read the material but can simply refer to their annotations.
Bradley’s Process
- Pre-test annotation to establish baseline. Text is John Edlund’s “Three Ways to Persuade.”
- Students are given direction on annotation strategies with an emphasis on restatement for understanding and summary. See Bradley Appendix 1. Students practice with a short newspaper editorial of a topic of relevance to the course.
- In-class annotation of test for assignment one. Students work in pairs to annotate just one chunk, usually a paragraph, of the assigned reading. Once one paragraph is completed, they are assigned another until the whole of the essay has been annotated on chunk/paragraph at a time. Done for two essays.
- Assignment two again has students working in pairs doing shared annotations but with larger chunks, perhaps a section or sub-section of the text at a time as opposed to a paragraph at a time. Again, the annotations are done during class and each student pair shares their work with the rest of the class so the whole class has a complete set of annotations.
- Assignment three has student assigned to annotate the whole of an essay on their own. As with previous annotation exercises, all annotations are directed to be restatements to indicate that students understand what they are reading. Students are again put in pairs or small groups to compare what each has come up with and to make any adjustments.
- Post-test annotation activity is completed and compared in relation to pre-test annotations to evaluate for changes in behavior. Text is the section of Ed White’s “Portfolios 2.0” addressing the role of portfolio cover letters in the assessment process.
