Classroom Research:  Introduction

After teaching L216 for the first time in 2001, I wrote a benchmark portfolio to document the goals and objectives of the course, what I was having students do to move them toward those goals, and the extent to which they were meeting the learning objectives of the course.  I was especially interested in how well students were developing intellectually vis-à-vis the course topic and also how well they were advancing in their writing skills.  Although I had a sense that students were, in fact, making progress, I was skeptical at my ability to assess that progress because of the interference of the personal relationships I had developed with the students.  Further, my own interest in demonstrating student growth (i.e. my desire to “prove” to others that I had succeeded) would necessarily vitiate any claim to objectivity I might put forth.  These considerations led me to collaborate with others to design a formal classroom research project wherein I could demonstrate with disinterested objectivity that my students had, indeed, made progress in the learning objectives I considered crucial in the class.

Before teaching L216 the second time, Lisa Kurz (I.U. Campuswide Writing Project) and I designed a classroom research project that would document, with demonstrable objectivity, students’ intellectual growth and their improvement in the skills necessary for writing effective college papers.  I collected “clean” copies of all four essays students had written throughout the semester and coded each with a numerical designation that embedded each student’s identity, the assignment number, and the grade I had assigned the paper.  These sixty-four documents were then handed over to a project administrator, who had hired four liberal studies graduate students who had experience teaching college writing.  The readers did not know me or anything about L216.