Classroom Research:  Discussion of Intellectual Growth Assessment

The results of the Intellectual Growth test were moderately positive, convincing me that students had, by and large, progressed toward a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the course topic.  Hence, the class discussions, the readings and explorations of other kinds of cultural productions, and the various assignments students completed were moderately successful in leading students toward a better and more critical understanding of the relationship between the capitalist-consumerist business world and the values of society in general.

Although I am pleased that such a relatively high proportion (roughly two-thirds) of students clearly demonstrated that they had made intellectual growth over the course of the semester, the five students whose work could not convince the disinterested readers of such growth led me to reflect on what kinds of road blocks students continue to face in reaching the learning goals for the course. I think the problem is connected to students’ continuing struggle with the academic skill of synthesis in their writing.  Even if all students did, in fact, grow in sophistication and complexity with respect to the course topic (a conclusion I believe based on ever increasing sophistication in class discussions), their writing could not always bear it out.  In some papers, ideas remained discreet, unrelated, unsupported, and unexplained, and when this was the case (i.e. when students could not synthesize and discuss their ideas effectively in writing), readers could only conclude that the authors of such papers made little or no intellectual growth.  This inseparable link between thought and its written expression puts a new spin on the admonition of writing teachers to their students:  content cannot be judged independently of its expression. At the same time, perhaps it points to a flaw in the research method of judging students’ intellectual growth on their writing. The alternative, of course, would be to have the students interviewed at the beginning and at the end of the semester. The logistics and cost of such a method, however, would be prohibitive.

The realization that students continued to struggle with the skill of synthesis and idea development, led me to teach these skills much more actively the following year.  First, as I have already described in another part of this portfolio, I revised each of the Writer’s Journals to conform to a standard format, including one content question, one inference question, and one synthesis question.  In class, I often lingered on the synthesis question, letting students struggle for a while and then helping them to draw the connections to the topic at hand.  We also spent considerable time finding answers to such questions as “Why did I pick this text?”; “What does this have to do with our course?”; or “How does this text relate to the one we just read?”  These kinds of verbal exercises helped the students to find connections and to see the course as a coherent whole.  In addition, I spent considerably more time in the year following the study modeling synthetic thinking for the students, giving examples of how to connect ideas, texts, and other evidence and how one might look at an idea from more than one perspective.  Finally, in responding to student drafts, I paid closer attention to students’ attempts at synthesis, encouraging them to connect ideas more explicitly and to draw conclusions that reached for more significance than mere observation.  My intention was to find ways to help students see more connections and commonalities among the various resources we had explored in the class as a means of seeing the course topic from a broader, more sophisticated perspective.  This, I hope, amounted to a higher level of intellectual growth among L216 students when I taught it during spring ‘03.