McCormick Chapter 4

It’s sort of funny that I’m about to summarize a chapter which defines summarizing as “inadequate,” though apparently it’s only inadequate if used as a “stopping-point” (p. 113).  In the chapter, McCormick described her socio-cultural interpretations of some cognitive research on student reading and writing.  Students in the experiment were provided with a text on time management.  Ideas in the text were intentionally contradictory, and the writing assignment purposefully vague.  Students wrote their papers, and groups and control groups participated (or did not participate) in metacognitive activities and think aloud protocols.  McCormick’s interpretations of the data were not exactly empirical, but rather she came to conclusions about some ideological underpinnings which influenced the students’ approaches to the tasks. 

McCormick argued that “ideology is expressed in the education systems of any society” (p. 106), and the ideological assumptions guiding students writing in this case had to do with closure, objectivity and unity. 

Regarding closure, students felt the need for everything in their writing to “fall into place.”  Rather than listening to their own ideas, and approaching the writing task with tentativeness, there was a need for closure in the form of straightforward summaries.  Students did not want to question ideas in a text, but rather, preferred get down to the bottom of exactly and definitively what the text was saying.  Reasons for this had to do with the perception that teachers want a polished, coherent final paper, and yet students only want to write one draft.  Therefore, instead of engaging with the text and writing drafts from a place of tentativeness and exploration, students tend to write one, straight-to-the-point draft, producing closure in the form of summaries (p. 114). 

Students also demonstrated through their writing beliefs about objectivity vs. subjectivity.  They felt the need to remain objective, not due to lack of coginitve abilities to write about their own ideas, but because of a lack of strategies helping them to do so.  Many students had also been taught to never use “I” which is confusing in a society which honors the individual, and contributes to students remaining objective in writing despite their desire to express their own thoughts.  McCormick suggested that we should provide students with opportunity to recognize that “there is not one correct and objective answer to a given problem” (p. 119), so they can explore why disagreements exist.  Students in the experiment struggled to incorporate, synthesize and analyze ideas representing conflicting view points, and therefore might have benefited from instruction allowing them to recognize the situated nature of positions, explore the assumptions underlying their own stances, and then acknowledge that they are choosing among diverse positions (p. 120). 

Students in the study also valued unity.  As mentioned above, they did not want to acknowledge contradictory ideas in their writing. “Students’ reticence to discuss a text’s contradictions is clearly both a cultural and cognitive problem.  Some students may fear that in discussing a text critically, they are implicitly criticizing the authority of the teacher, whom they imagine thinks the essay is coherent” (p. 126). This is about the idea of authorship and textual authority.  Students should be made aware “that texts are always contradictory” (p. 126), and should be encouraged to look for cultural contradictions in the texts they read.

McCormick argued that we should explore why students read and write as they do (after observing what they do).  She seems to be making some generalizations about ideological assumptions particular to a specific culture and context.  I wonder exactly how to accomplish what she asks us to do in a diverse class of international students representing multiple nationalities (or in any class represented by various, very different cultures)…