“What Do You Mean I Wrote a C Paper?” Writing, Revision, and Self-Regulation

Abstract

Students often express surprise at their grades on papers. This gap between expectation andachievement may stem in part from lack of facility with revision strategies. How, then, can teacherswork with their students to foster more effective revisions? This question in teaching and learninghas inspired an interdisciplinary collaboration: one of us is a management and leadership professor(Sharen), and the other is an English/communication professor (Feltham). In this essay, we describea research study from winter 2013 in which we explored how a series of interventions improvedstudents’ mindsets about the process of drafting and revising reports for a second-year-universitycourse entitled “Women and Leadership.” After outlining key aspects of this study that we feel are ofgeneral interest, we then present a series of reflective suggestions about how to teach revision derivedfrom both our experiences and a selective survey of the literature on both revision and self-regulation.