Revision in tasks of writing to learn in college mathematics : the case for instructional support

The researcher and two teachers of college developmental mathematics collaboratively planned three tasks of writing to learn in mathematics which involved instructional support and a chance for revising. Given these three tasks, the study was designed to examine students' writings for length, syntactic maturity, and cognitive operations and the teachers' and students' perceptions of these tasks.

Teachers were interviewed and classrooms observed. Students' writings were collected and analyzed. Scores on chapter tests currently in use by the teachers were also collected. Toward the end of the study, students answered a questionnaire about the writing.

Students' second drafts were longer at statistically significant levels than their first drafts on two length measures for two tasks. The syntactic maturity of the drafts was judged to be low, comparable to low-functioning high school students on three measures of syntax for all three tasks. Their revisions in the first and second tasks were made at rather "high" linguistic levels as compared to other studies for both basic and accomplished high school students. In the first and second tasks, students used revision strategies of addition, deletion, and substitution almost exclusively. However, in the third task, the use of the scheme employed to analyze revisions was judged inadequate to capture the changes students made between first and second drafts. Cognitive operations interacted with task, with students' use of four cognitive operations (contrast, change, time sequences, and logical sequence) statistically different between the three writing tasks. Scores on chapter tests were somewhat higher for students in two writing-aided classrooms as compared to scores of students in two non-writing aided classrooms taught by the two teachers, but these differences were not statistically significant.

Both teachers perceived these tasks as unusual tasks for a college mathematics classroom. They thought the tasks helped students and gave the teachers information about students' understandings of mathematics, information which was more detailed but of a different nature as compared to similar information they might receive from other sources.

Teachers were differentiated in their implementation of the writing tasks, their responses to students' writing, their perceptions of the three writing tasks, and in their perceptions of writing in general by a writing-experienced/ inexperienced dichotomy. Several actions on the part of the teachers characterized their support in instruction for the writing, both in drafting and revising.

Students thought that the tasks, including the chance to revise, helped them in their mathematics class in a number of ways, but saw the tasks as difficult ones to carry out.