High school students revise their French mistakes better on paper than digitally, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Université du Quebec à Montréal (UQAM).
The study highlights that students make fewer mistakes on paper than on a computer, for example.
Rosianne Arseneau, language education professor at UQAM, who participated in the study, said that data for their research was collected from students in grades 7 through 11 in schools belonging to federation of private schools (Fédération des établissements d’enseignement privés).
The researchers asked the organization to refer them to schools with students from diverse linguistic backgrounds in order to study multilingual classes.
The fact that students revise less effectively on digital media than on paper can be explained in particular by the fact that this environment is less conducive to reflection during language revision than paper, said Arseneau, who is also a techno-pedagogical expert in French teaching at Alloprof.
“When students are on screen, they have access to automatic spell check. To create a situation that is still authentic to today’s writing, there were small underlines displayed by the Word spell checker. So the typical student, when revising in a digital environment, will rely heavily on that spell checker,” explained Arseneau.
Arseneau indicated that the appearance of a small line is “very reactive” in students’ revisions, who will ultimately want to resolve the lines. This leads to revisions that are “very focused on the feedback from the spell checker and much less on reflection,” she explained. Arseneau
“Whereas students who revise on paper tend to engage in more comprehensive reflection, looking for the class of a word: ‘ah, it’s a verb, I’ll draw an arrow to the subject,’ and therefore engage in much more in-depth reflection on paper,” Arseneau added.
While automatic correctors sometimes make suggestions that are relevant, they can also make suggestions that are incorrect, which may also explain the higher number of errors on computers than on paper, she said.
“There are times when the proofreader actually leads the student to an error that did not exist in the first place,” she added. What we also saw was that students tend to work significantly more often on non-errors. When they are on the screen, it is as if they see their mistakes less clearly and spend time working on elements that are not mistakes.”
First, they asked a sample of 308 students to complete a 60-minute online questionnaire with questions about revision. The students also had to detect errors in a text and correct them, then explain what strategies they used to correct these errors.
The researchers also conducted semi-structured interviews with about 20 students, which allowed them to compare the paper and digital environments.
They met with this group of students twice. On one occasion, they asked the students to write a short text on a paper tablet using a “smart pen,” which recorded all of the student’s movements. This allowed the researchers to observe whether the students made arrows, marks, or crossings-out. They also recorded the students’ voices and asked them to verbalize as much as possible what they were saying to themselves while revising their texts, explained Arseneau.
The researchers then asked these students to do roughly the same exercise, but this time on a digital medium.
Arseneau believes that these results show that it is necessary to work on revision strategies in the digital environment, taking into account the specific characteristics of this medium, and to teach these strategies to students.
The professor said she spoke with an educational advisor from a school service center who has implemented a method of self-correction on screen, using digital highlighters to identify the components of a sentence.
“So it’s as if the famous arrows we were taught, and the marks we make on paper, have been transposed and adapted to Word tools for revision,” said Arseneau.
The teacher pointed out that all students at this school district take their ministerial exams on screen, highlighting the need to teach an appropriate revision method.
“If we just teach them to revise on paper, then they arrive at the exam and try to apply a method they learned on paper, it doesn’t work. There is a transfer problem, and that will create difficulties,” she argued.
Arseneau indicated that the situation varies greatly from one school service center to another, but that the Ministry of Education now allows ministerial exams to be taken on screen.
The professor specified that during these assessments, it is the criteria related to language that cause the most difficulty for students.
The researchers are continuing to analyze their results in order to study different revision strategies and provide teachers with tools they can pass on to their students.
“Students are often told to implement the entire list of strategies using a very lengthy process, but for students, this is often too much. The next steps are more individualized, personalized teaching of strategies based on their writing profile,” said Arseneau.
“It’s like a construction site with lots of results that we’re trying to structure in order to apply them to teaching practice and support students in this area. We know that there are challenges that we can shed light on with our results.”
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
