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<\/p>\nA few years ago, I visited an English Department meeting at a well-known high school. The topic under discussion: a recently published “English Department Guide to Annotation.”<\/p>\n
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After the meeting, one of the authors asked me what I thought of the guide and the research behind it.<\/p>\n
I asked: “Well, what IS the research behind it?”<\/p>\n
The teacher answered: “Oh, ALL the research says this.”<\/p>\n
Although this answer (“ALL the research shows…”) is quite common, it always makes me nervous.<\/p>\n
In the first place<\/em>, it sounds like a dodge, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of answer I might give\u00a0if I didn’t actually know much about the research<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the second place:\u00a0<\/em>it’s never true<\/strong>. Because teaching and psychology and research are all so complicated, researchers NEVER get the precisely same answer when they study interesting, complex, and important questions about teaching.<\/p>\n Even retrieval practice — one of the most research-supported teaching strategies we have! — doesn’t have unanimous support in the research literature.<\/p>\n So: what does research say about annotating texts? I recently stumbled across a study that explores this question…<\/p>\n A recently published study<\/a> looks quite specifically at the benefits of teaching annotation. In this study,\u00a0125\u00a08th grade students in a social studies class learned a specific method for annotation; another 125 served as the control group.<\/p>\n The students who learned this new method got LOTS of practice: at least 100 minutes over 6 weeks. The study used a “business as usual” control group, which means that the teachers just taught as they usually do for the students who didn’t learn about annotation.<\/p>\n The result: impressive!<\/p>\n In brief, the students who annotated thought the method was relatively easy to use. And, they scored higher on a reading-comprehension test.<\/p>\n If you speak stats, you’ll be impressed to see that the Cohen’s d was 0.46: an attention-getting number for a 6-week intervention.<\/p>\n So far, this study gives us reason to focus on teaching annotation.<\/p>\n And yet, I do have concerns: some specific<\/strong> to this study, and some more generally<\/strong> about applying research to classrooms.<\/p>\n SPECIFIC concern:<\/p>\n As you can see in the image above, the annotating method includes highlighting<\/em>. Alas,\u00a0researchers have looked at highlighting specifically, and found it to be largely unhelpful.<\/p>\nA Promising Start<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>Subsequent Concerns<\/h2>\n