Blog #4: Lulu

The Fei case study provided me with useful insight into a sample writing process of someone who might submit their work for online tutoring. I was especially interested to learn that Fei first writes her drafts in a single sitting and then revises her drafts in a second single sitting after receiving feedback from online tutoring. I'm wondering if it would be useful to add a space on our online tutoring system for students to offer how much time they've spent writing and/or revising before submitting their drafts for online feedback (I know there's already a space for students to say how much time they plan to set aside to revise AFTER receiving feedback from a tutor).

In my experience with online tutoring so far, I've encountered a few papers that seemed to be in the very early stages of drafting. One of these papers was a research paper where the sources that the writer was drawing from weren't credible, despite the prompt's stipulation that all sources needed to be scholarly. Because these sources weren't credible, the paper's evidence was thin and the overall organization was suffering. In a margin comment, I pointed the writer in the direction of Google Scholar and the library database and then offered an example of a specific search term she could use (which I tried out myself to make sure some solid results would come up) to help her come up with some better-suited sources.

However, reading about Fei's process and experience with online tutoring, where she was more inclined to prioritize marginal grammar comments over global feedback, made me wonder if this was a useful way to give feedback. I'm curious what you all think (or if there was a better way for me to give feedback in this case). Should I have stuck to trying to give global feedback using the material that was already there, or was it fair to add the note about sources knowing that the writer might have a more significant revision on her hands?

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 18, 2018 at 8:43 PM

    In this case, it's my opinion that you had to tell the student their sources were suspect, right? I mean, even if improper or flimsy sources aren't a "writing issue" (in the way that poor content organization is), it still strikes me as a global issue in that unreliable sources threaten the integrity of the entire paper. I wonder if this judgement would feel more intuitive in a face-to-face session, and if so, what that says about how tutors and students interact with one another when they aren't meeting in person. When a tutor and student are only communicating across the vacuum of a computer terminal, I wonder if it's tempting to interpret all feedback as having equal weight and particular to the assignment at hand.

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