Research Idea: Impact of Student Revision of Papers and Projects on Development of Critical Thinking

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The following passage is taken from my 1995 Change article, "Asking the Right Questions: What Research Tells Us About Technology and Higher Learning."

"Back in 1987 Raymond J. Lewis and I were looking for faculty members who had at least two years of teaching in an environment where students had unfettered access to personal computing."One place we visited was Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where the current seniors had four years of easy access to Macintosh computers. I talked to faculty members from eight departments, asking what they liked about teaching in this environment.

"Surprisingly, there was one thing that all of them had noticed. As two of them put it, 'I'm no longer embarrassed to ask the student to do it over again.' Because computer- based documents and projects are mechanically easier to revise, their students pressed to get a second chance to improve their work and their grade. Gradually the texture of the curriculum in each course was changing: toward projects developed in stages--plan, draft, conversation, another draft, final version. Each stage of work was marked by rethinking, and by learning. We called this strategy Doing It Again, Thoughtfully (DIATing).

"I also asked a couple of seniors if they thought their education had been influenced by their use of computers. One of them replied that he'd learned that it's not one's first draft or thought that matters, but the final version. In what course had he learned that, I asked. He replied that it had been over a series of courses.

Similarly, several faculty members and the director of the writing program independently suggested that the most tangible impact of computer availability would be at the capstone of the curriculum, in the intellectual tightness and coherence of bachelor's theses.

"The day at Reed had a surprise ending. When Ray and I sat down with several of the College's educational and technology leaders, they were astonished by what we'd heard that day. The growth of DIATing had been an ecological change, not directed centrally. They hadn't known that their technology was being used in that way or with those kinds of outcomes. That's because their institutional strategy was the sum of large numbers of independent actions by many faculty members and students across the college."

I've thought a lot about that day in the years since. I have been especially stimulated by Walter Ong's wonderful little book,Orality and Literacy. Ong suggested that the ways that we think -- for example the way the argument in this essay is structured - that the ways we think are fundamentally influenced by our heritage of using reading and writing. Reading and writing allow us to gradually develop a complex, clean structure of argument.

Ong's argument suggests to me that the Reed's emphasis, across the curriculum, on written projects that develop in stages, with lots of feedback, is helping graduate seniors who are especially good at creating and critiquing complex arguments. If my informants were correct, the fossil record of this change in thinking should still be visible in the bachelor's theses written at Reed and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s.

Is there such a fossil record of a change in the skills of thinking? If so, what does it tell us about the nature of learning, teaching, and how technology use can change both? Might be a good dissertation topic.

- Stephen C. Ehrmann

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