Reflection on Winter term 2009 - Theme Writing

1. What was good about TW this term?

• 18 out of 20 passed! A very good rate.
• Did "hand-back" tutorials for final comments. These work really well, especially if the student has written a nice self-evaluation and submitted it before the tutorial. Need to require that more clearly next time.
• Several mentioned that they discovered a "love" of research paper writing. That's my main goal.
• The 18 who passed stayed with the draft deadline schedule mostly very well. Nobody got lower than a C, and ended up with about six As Bs Cs. The 60% process, 40% final paper formula seemed to mostly work well, although I might go to a 50/50 system because I felt that I wanted to reward the result of the final paper more.

2. What needs to be improved?

• Peer review should be done on a "writer requested" basis. In other words, the writer should ask a peer to read/review the paper. "Could you let me know what you think?" rather than a reviewer just writing unsolicited ideas on Moodle. So, the task will be for the writer to get one or more reviews from peers and attach it to the draft or final paper, not for the writer to just write two reviews of peers. This peer review can be done in class or outside class as preferred. In the end, it will be the responsibility of the writer to find one or two classmates to do reviews. The evidence I see will only be the peer review report. Will that work? That may allow some students to get away without ever Giving a peer review. Is that allowable? I'll give it a try next time.
• Self-evaluation with a detailed checklist...I want students to come up with their own score out of 40 or 50 points and just sign off that "I agree with your self-evaluation." Dave makes that part of the grade, and I want to do that too. That ought to be part of one of the final classes.
  
• Read/Analyze past student papers. Sonomi's paper is a good one.
• Put more self-study resources online - How to choose a topic, What is a thesis? How do organize sections of research paper...short slide shows with voice overs would be coolest. Coupling slide shows/demos with a checklist would be killer. Maybe I'll start one for Spring ARW and grow it for TW.
  
• Reserve computer lab early on to allow for research of databases in one of the earliest classes and also to introduce online resources.
  
• Consider Owen's Google Doc approach - All outlining and drafts done on one Google Doc - How did that go over with his class? I assume it could really turn off some students who prefer to do less on computers, but at the same time, most of TW is done on computers anyway, so nothing is lost. It would be really nice to be able to keep comments recorded on the draft and also to see the stage by stage developments of the paper.
  

Overall, I had a very good feeling about how TW went this term, and seeing how I am not scheduled to teach it