ADVANTAGES OF USING ELECTRONIC PROCESSES FOR COMMENTING ON AND EXCHANGING THE WRITTEN WORK OF STUDENTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES AND/OR AD/HD, THE

Composition Studies, Fall 2006 by Carmichael, Stephen, Alden, Peg

The responses that instructors write on student essays are a subject of much discussion in academic circles. The varied purposes for writing such comments, their short- and long-term efficacy, their tone and length, and their emotional impact on students as developing writers are all worthy and well-explored topics of inquiry, as a review of the relevant literature quickly demonstrates. Much less attention has been given to more concrete, yet equally important questions: How can an instructor's written comments, whatever their nature, be most effectively communicated to students? How can we best expedite students' efforts to act on our suggestions for revision? And what methods for exchanging and managing documents best enable students and teachers to locate and work with the drafts that provide the forum for this discourse?

The average college student today has grown up with computers and now uses them for communicating with friends and family, playing games, shopping, downloading music, checking the news and weather, surfing the Web, conducting research, and writing papers for school. These days, it's the rare student who turns up in one of our classes needing instruction in basic computer functions, and most are quick to master the campus email system. Most of our students at Landmark College, all of whom have diagnoses of language- and/or attention-based disabilities, are quick to embrace assistive technologies such as voice recognition and text-to-speech software and incorporate them, as appropriate, into their writing processes.

At the same time that most writing instructors expect students to be willing to try new computer-based writing process strategies, many of these same instructors continue to use the print-based marking techniques they used when they themselves were college students. For many, these habits date from an era that now seems distant almost to the point of quaintness, when the typewriter was still the most effective tool for producing clear text, and handwriting was the most convenient and effective method for marking papers, because paper was literally the only medium available for turning in written work.

In the current academic setting, in what might be viewed as a transitional period between print and electronic media, students are required to adapt to the preferred submission and revision modes of each of their instructors. Some instructors will only accept printed drafts; others request (or grudgingly accept) electronic submission via email attachment, shared folder, or drop-box, and then print the drafts themselves and return them with their handwritten comments; still others have come to use the fully electronic process for marking and exchanging work that we advocate. As a result, students may use three or four different processes for managing their written work in the course of a semester. As we hope to show, this lack of consistency needlessly complicates the academic lives of our students, particularly the growing number of college students whose writing processes are hampered by language- and/or attention-based issues.

Although it is beyond the scope of this article to delve into a detailed discussion of the symptoms and educational outcomes for college students with learning disabilities and attentional disorders, it is important to begin with some basic understanding of these diagnoses, their frequency on college campuses, and their impact on many of the writers we see in our classrooms and writing centers.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) defines a Specific Learning Disability (LD) as "a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written" (IDEA 101-476). In part because of this law and the support that it gives students with disabilities, more and more students with a diagnosed LD are now going to college. Indeed, "learning disability" is the fastest growing category of reported disabilities among college students today (Henderson 5). Similarly, students with Attention Deficit Disorder (AD/HD), which manifests as "a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity" (DSM4tr 78), are another large and increasing population on college campuses (Byron and Parker 341; Farrell 50). Some studies indicate that students needing services for AD/HD are growing in such numbers that they may soon equal those with learning disabilities (Byron and Parker 341).

Attention disorders are not considered learning disabilities in the strictest sense of the term, but the two conditions frequently coexist (Katz 39; Pliszka 192) and both can profoundly impact a college student's academic performance (DuPaul, et al.) Given that 65% of students with AD/HD suffer from a written expression learning disability (Brown, "New Understandings"), and that writing problems are believed to exceed the other academic challenges faced by students with learning disabilities (Li and Hamel 29), we have chosen to focus our article on the overlapping groups of LD and AD/HD college students and the ways in which widely-available electronic processes can support their writing.