Will providing students with personalized feedback on their MLA style and research skills and recommendations for review materials early in the course improve their performance in these areas on the first essay?

English 101 is a prerequisite for English 103, but, for a variety of reasons, many students enter English 103 online having not completely mastered the skills taught in English 101, limiting their success, especially on early assignments. Of particular concern are skills in the areas of research and documentation.

In this project, I proposed that by having students assessed (both self-assessment and objective assessment) early in the course and then providing them with resources tailored to their specific needs to assist them with review of this 101-level material, the students will be more successful in English 103.

As part of the required online orientation (taking place in the first two days of the semester), my online English 103 students completed a quiz through Blackboard that asked them for their own assessment of their mastery of the research and documentation skills taught in English 101 as well as asking them to answer objective questions relating to those skills to measure their current areas of strength and weakness. Students received immediate scores and feedback through Blackboard (see attachment 1 for questions and results)*.

Additionally, by the end of the first week of class, I emailed each student with an individualized list of resources designed to help them review in the areas in which they show weakness (for a sample, see attachment 2)*. The resources consisted largely of online exercises and other self-paced presentations and handouts (see attachment 3)*.

At the time that the first essay was due (approximately four weeks into the course), students were asked to complete a survey that asked them about their usage of these review materials. They were also asked to approximate the amount of time spent in each area and also to rate their satisfaction with the resources. If they chose not to spend time with the review materials, they were be asked for their reasons (see attachment 3 for survey results)*.
 
After grading the first assignment, I tallied the number of errors in MLA style formatting and source documentation as well as the number and types of sources used. I then compared these results to those from two previous semesters’ English 103 classes that have not gone through this process (Spring and Fall 2005) (see attachment 4)*.

No significant modifications. The tracking feature did not work as anticipated, so I had to rely on student reports of how long they spent with review materials.

I noticed a significant decrease in errors in MLA style. For example, in Fall 2005, 11 of 14 students did not format the heading of the essay correctly, but in Spring 2006 only 5 of 17 had errors in that area. More students also used appropriate library sources (such as Proquest) as support in their essays.

Some areas did not improve as much as I anticipated, though. For instance, students still struggled with finding reliable Internet sites to use as sources, and the overall grades on the essays were not significantly better (see attachment 5 for full results).

I will continue to use this type of early assessment and response in future classes and make review materials available to students. I will likely revise the questions to target the areas that were still weak in the Spring 2006 essays. It does seem from these results that the best outcomes came with skills that were fairly mechanical (MLA style formatting, Works Cited entries, using Proquest) as opposed to those involving more critical thinking (evaluating Internet sources).

In the future, I may be interested in using this technique to target skills that involve more critical thinking.

I would also be interested in exploring the use of different types of feedback -- computer scored vs. personal email from instructor. In this study I used both methods, so it is not clear if one or the other (or a combination of the two) led to the result.