On Wednesday, students submitted their second round of reflection posts. I wrote last week about how I was using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count as a jumping off point for broadly analyzing student work across the two sections (face-to-face and online). This gives me some high level data on categories like “positive emotion” and “negative emotion” as expressed through reflection. Students in the online section used more words that express anxiety and sadness than the face-to-face section. Armed with this knowledge, I decided to put a magnifying glass to the reflection posts. One thing that I picked up when I read them was that several students mentioned the word “perfectionist” in their writing. Some excerpts:
“After looking at it though, I know I need a LOT more work, and the perfectionist side of me wasn’t exactly pleased with the final product.”
“Being the perfectionist I am, I found myself getting very frustrated when I couldn’t get it to look exactly like the example.”
“I was eager to learn about and use these softwares, but also got frustrated when my “perfectionist” self could not excel at Photoshop and Indesign immediately.”
I ran the text through a tool called http://voyant-tools.org/ which will do things like create a Wordle and show word frequency.
The term “perfectionist” shows up seven times in six different posts. Of the six students who used the word “perfectionist” this week, five of them are in the online section (which about a third of the class). This leads me to ask a few questions to myself: 1.) Did they all sit down and write these together (not incredibly likely) 2.) Do I have a class that is abnormally disproportionate in students that excessively set high performance standards for themselves? (still not likely) 3.) Does a physical classroom afford certain things that reduce anxiety? (maybe?).
I decided that, whatever it was, I was going to take some time to give all students some positive encouragement and feedback through some short emails. The past weekend and first half of the week was spent in Anaheim for the Educause ELI conference so I spent my Friday evening in my hotel room reading the reflections carefully and writing students emails. They were short and concise. I received three emails back from students in my online section and three from my face-to-face. All seemed thankful for the email.
I’ve also ran this week’s student blog posts through LIWC and started to look carefully at if/how student’s writing is changing.
Embedded above is a working spreadsheet from the data. I saw more movement in the online section (995) More mentions of social words, less anxiety, higher positive emotion, significantly lower negative emotion, longer posts, etc. Conversely, the face-to-face section is writing less. Which might not necessarily be a bad thing–considering we talk and reflect more in the classroom. My guess is that the online section will continue to write more than the face-to-face.
I’m going to try to document articles I’m reading as well to keep a journal of external pieces that may be influencing my decisions:
- Faculty Focus. “Peer Critique: Two Strategies for Getting Students to Give Feedback.“
- Linda S. Futch. “Cooperative Learning Groups in Online Courses.”
- Jonan Donaldson “The Maker Movement and the Rebirth of Constructionism” on Hybrid Pedagogy.
- Justin Reich. “Techniques for Unleashing Student Work from Learning Management Systems.” KQED Mindshift.
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