How do I evaluate student analytical work?
What follows is what I told my students as I discussed the midterm assignment of analyzing a clip from Citizen Kane. I’m looking for these things, and asking these questions. I note that the questions are student-facing and address students in the second person, instead of (for example) “what did the student see?”
- ATTENTION: What do you see?
- PRECISION: How do you use the specific vocabulary and concepts of cinema to
describe what you see? - INSIGHT: Why does your observation matter? What’s being communicated or
suggested by the things you’ve seen and described?
What does Dr. C. want? What is he looking for?
Attention, precision, and insight.
Easier said than done, certainly, but that’s true of most worthy attempts. And the saying may help the doing–part of the teacher’s job, I think.
This is standard stuff, and the categories and questions reflect my current articulation of the standard stuff. That said, I wish someone had said this to me in something like this way when I was coming along. By the time I got to college I had more or less figured it out, and to be honest, I found that when I was really passionate about my topic I would almost certainly do exactly this. Yet it would have been good, even at that, to be more intentional about the categories and questions, and it might have saved me a few awkward, disengaged, or flailing papers.
Looking over my students’ analyses, I found insight to be the rarest accomplishment. I expected that, because it takes practice to get to that level, and we’re only halfway through the term (or we were when the exam was given). What’s more of a concern for me at this point is the work that reflects very poor attention. The clip was about two and a half minutes long, so it’s not the span of attention that seems to be the problem. Rather, it seems more like the practice of patient, focused, even ferocious attention that is unfamiliar or somehow thwarted, or even refused, in some instances.
It’s interesting to think about the difference between casually experiencing a stream of stimuli and concentrating on a stream of stimuli in an effort to find patterns and make meaning. The latter effort also requires some faith that the ardors of concentration will reveal patterns and meanings that are really there, and that the effort is not just performative because every interpretation is valid and it’s all subjective anyway etc.
Of course subjectivity can be shared, inquired into, self-corrected, improved in judgment, and so forth. Subjectivity and extreme relativism are not the same. But I wonder, often, if there’s some way to discuss such matters with greater sophistication earlier in my students’ education. Many attitudes ranging from cynicism to indifference to outright disbelief and hostility (sometimes in the guise of a kind of critical libertarianism) have already been cultivated before I see them.
Nevertheless, it’s often still possible to recognize, encourage, and share attention, precision, and insight. Given the difficulties of life in 2021, perhaps the miracle is that I see attention, precision, and insight as often as I do. But it is a challenge, and saddening, to see the work that can’t (or won’t?) attend precisely or with insight to a focal point of shared attention–especially because the explanation or commentary I offer will in many cases (not all) suffer the same fate as the original object of analysis.
So I try to say the same sorts of things in as many different ways and at as many surprising times as possible. Brains, hearts, spirits are so distinctive that it can be impossible to know what will catch or when it will sink in. Though it seems many years now since we started our course of study, in truth semesters are short. Teaching must be content, often, with the long term and much that may forever be invisible to the teacher. After all these years, I’m not quite used to that.
Photo CC BY-SA-NC by Gardner Campbell