Wednesday Work Day (2)

KT, my mentor, asked me to read: Richard H. Haswell, "Minimal Marking," in College English 45, no. 6 (1983), 166-70. Here is a brief summary:

Early 1980s research showed that marking up student writing did not improve performance, at least not the way they were marking papers back then.

Rather than take all the time to correct surface errors, why not just put a check mark down on the page when the teacher encounters an error, and then hand the paper back for students to hunt down the errors and make the corrections themselves? Haswell's informal counts show that the students really do find most of their own errors:

Category of Error	Number of Errors Checked in Margin byTeacher	Number of Errors Correctly Emended by Students	Percent Corrected by Students
Semantic Signalling (capitalization, underlining, quotation marks, apostrophes)	97	74	76.3%
Syntactic Punctuation	142	81	57.0%
Spelling (including hyphenation)	132	74	56.1%
Grammar (including tense change, omission of word, pronoun disagreement)	30	16	53.3%
All Errors	401	245	61.1%

This method is "less work for the teacher, more gain for the student." Haswell only counted minor errors of style, and not errors of reasoning or organization, which begs the question of his conclusion:

Can this method be transferred to other aspects of writing? I think so, although right now I must speculate. Certainly problems of writing that lend themselves to spot improvement could well be marked with marginal checks: injudicious diction, needed transitions, unsupported generalities. Larger, structural problems such as stumbling introductions and disordered paragraphs might be signaled with marginal lines. More interestingly, so might fallacies and other lapses in thinking. In each case the effort would be to find the minimal functional mark. The best mark is that which allows students to correct the most on their own with the least help. An obvious pedagogical truth-but one that runs counter to the still established tradition of full correction.