Persuasive Developments: Reflective Judgment and College Students' Written Argumentation

2003 Dissertation by Amy Overbay--available

Excerpts from  Conclusions Section

"However, the majority of the essays written by both groups of participants used onesided
positions, and did not examine or respond to objections in a sustained way. In most
cases, participants used evidence that was not examined critically, and offered unqualified
claims. Participants in both groups appeared reluctant to concede contested points, and in the
majority of their essays failed to address the fundamental conflict underlying the rhetorical
problem. These characteristics have been identified in other studies of students’ persuasive
writing (Crammond, 1998; Hays, 1988; Hillocks, 1995)" (202).


"The results of this study provide substantiation for Davidson et al.’s (1990) prediction
that reflective judgment may play an important role in how some students construct solutions
to the dilemmas they face when writing arguments. Given these findings, assuming that all
freshmen come to the first day of classes equipped with the necessary repertoire of cognitive
skills for dealing with ill-structured problems in writing may problematize their ability to
produce the kinds of arguments we want them to write" (207)

"The instructor in this study voiced a widely-held belief that students’ difficulties with written arguments pertained to their lack of preparation for college writing, or to their lack of intelligence. The possibility that some writing behaviors may be related to the developmental nature of students’ beliefs about knowing and justifying provides an important alternative explanation for instructors searching for ways to clarify for students what they expect from them" (208).

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Discussion and Implications of Overbay's Study

I have taught Freshman Composition II, the class that focuses most explicitely on academic argumentation, for almost twenty years, and I have from the start noticed the difficulty freshmen have with what I term the "critical essay." Students that might do well in Freshman Comp I where the writing is more expressive in nature fall flat on their face when confronted with this task of forming and supporting an argument. From the start, I have noticed the high failure rate (if I could call it that) on the first essay which typically has been to form an argument supporting an interpretation of a work of literature, so I have my students rewrite the first paper. Overbay states that most instructors believe that lack of familiarity with academic conventions or a students intelligence are the prime causes for this difficulty in writing. However, her research confirming the presence of the expected stages of development within freshmen writer's arguments indicates that cognitive development issues may be more important. Students are not ready for the kind of reflective thinking we set as our learning objectives for this kind of writing assignment. It is like we are asking them to jump and touch a ten foot high basketball rim, and they are only able to jump and touch a six foot rim.

Two things about these findings jump out at me:
1. Deterministic view
If we carry these findings too far, we fall into what we might call a materialistic view of human behavior (in this case the learning and performing behavior of freshman writers). The hard-wired nature of the mind's development shapes, then, what these individuals are able to think and do in terms of their writing tasks. For those of us who ascribe to the outside influence of society and language upon our thinking and consciousness, this sort of fundamental determinism below this level of social influence is disturbing and hard to swallow.

2. Modifications
Maybe we can see the teaching practices that have been labeled "current traditional" in a new light based upon these findings. In many ways, the formalist impulses and of current traditional pedagogy might be seen as modifications made by generations of teachers to create writing tasks that are more developmentally appropriate for students at this developmental level. Such formalist tasks tend to make writing into a "well-structured" problem; whereas, the new rhetorical pedagogy that emerged since the 1960s emphasized the rhetorical, and thus "ill-structured" aspects of the writing task. Perhaps freshmen writers are not yet ready for the full blast of rhetoric's ill-structured nature? We might ask why after all these years of critiquing writing forms such as the five-paragraph essay do they persist. The work of King and Kitchener may offer an interesting explanation in this sort of writing's developmental appropriateness.

In my own thinking about reflection, I have come up with a number of different metaphors to explain some of my assumptions about its nature and role in learning and writing. My favorite is the Superman telephone booth. Clark Kent sees a crisis or problem, jumps into a near by phone booth still clothed in his newspaperman suit, and then after moments emerges as Superman in his superman suit. Reflection is like that phone booth--students enter it and become transformed. The act of reflection is some kind of catalyst for change or development in thinking (and by extension action). It is nice to leave the booth as a black box where unknown and unidentified things happen, but many thinkers on reflection have anatomized the thinking that goes on within the reflection telephone booth. This reflective thinking is described as a method or even as a sort of formula or perhaps you could call it a dance. We can map this thinking and it exists as a static model representing a form of mental activity.

The assumption has been that if we could only engage students in this type of thinking (because it is out there as a method or model to perform)--if we could only shove them in the Superman telephone booth--good things would happen. The magic powers of reflection would create change and transformation and all sort of good things.

King and Kitchener's work, as well as Overbay's, tells us that we might shove students in the telephone booth, but they are not able or ready to engage in the kind of reflective thinking we assume they will do. No wonder we are disappointed in the kinds of reflections our students do. No wonder we don't see the results of this kind of reflection that we might expect. No wonder suddenly all our students don't have superman caps and are flying through the sky after we ask them to reflect.

My sense is that the take away from asking students to engage in reflection is more than what can be summarized in the capacity of their epistemic cognition. As Boud as discussed, the outputs from reflection are multiple and varied. However, I believe this research is significant and can help me understand better what expectation I might have for my students' reflections (as well as their abilities as thinkers and writers in my class)