Revision As a Tangled Knot: Seventh-Graders' Capacity, Investment, and Instruction in Re-Seeing Their Own Work

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 5:10 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Wicked Renewal: Reframing Problems of Writing Instruction in Secondary Classrooms (Table 3)

Abstract

Overview
Revision can be positioned as a wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973). As one part of the writing process, revision has the potential to help students re-see their writing so they might make changes to their ideas and how they communicate these ideas to readers. Yet, students are often unclear what it means to revise or how to go about recognizing issues in their writing. Even when students find issues, they may lack the knowledge to fix the piece. Classroom teachers must make decisions about what to focus on when teaching revision and how to take action, all the while knowing that other challenges will be revealed in the meantime (Author, 2024). Framing revision as a wicked problem with no one right way to teach revision and no one solution helps teachers and researchers to approach the teaching of revision as a critical piece of the writing process.

Context, Data, and Analysis
​​This study is part of a larger study on 7th graders’ knowledge about and understanding of revision. For this presentation, we investigated students’ understandings about revision. Students answered the following questions: How would you describe yourself as a writer? How would you describe yourself as a reviser? Students were asked to rate themselves across one of five categories (Very Poor, Poor, Fair Good, Very Good) and to explain their rationale for that rating.

Participants were 339 seventh grade students (52% male, 48% female) in a suburban middle school. Students within the district were 66% Caucasian, 14.7 % African-American, 14.1% Asian, 3.7% multi-racial, and 1.4 % Hispanic. Within the district, 10% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch. Quantitative survey data was computed using Qualtrics software. All open responses were imported into an Excel document. The results were coded and analyzed using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Findings
Over half the students (53%) indicated they were less proficient with revising than with writing. Students demonstrated awareness that writing and revision are different processes and judged their facility with revision lower than their writing abilities. Even with the 12% of students who considered themselves very good writers, only 5% of students said they were very good revisers.

Given the complicated conceptional nature of revision, the students’ comments indicated that issues surrounding students’ abilities to revise were actually symptoms of three other problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973): capacity, investment, and instruction. Capacity focuses on student knowledge. Investment is the level of which students care about their writing and the writing process. Instruction is the way in which writing is typically taught. Metaphorically, we present these three problems as “strands,” within a tangled knot that changes with each attempt to unravel it (Ramaley, 2014). We acknowledge that the boundaries dividing each strand are permeable and interconnected. There is no single fix for helping students become stronger revisers, rather, it is an interplay among the different problems of teaching students about revision.

Word count: 485

Authors

• Denise N. Morgan, Western Carolina University

• Jessica Hrubik, Champion Local Schools