Pedagogical uses of annotations and annotation technologies

Because the marginal commentary that expert readers often leave behind on texts can reflect a range of constructive reading strategies, exposing students to annotations by expert readers might provide information that will help students write reader-based prose. Since technologies for creating and sharing annotations are currently under development, compositionists need research examining the costs and benefits of using annotations in composition pedagogy.; Four related studies are reported. The first examines how expert readers annotate. The second gives 123 composition students copies of variously annotated letters to the editor on a lawsuit against a university. Students read the letters, wrote persuasive essays, and answered a post-writing questionnaire. Students receiving materials with evaluative commentary were less reliant on summary and made better use of primary source materials than students receiving non-annotated materials. The perceived position of the annotator also influenced students' argumentative activity. Students perceiving the annotator as agreeing with their position seemed to include more irrelevant material than students perceiving the annotator as neutral.; A follow-up study randomly distributed to 129 students either a “pro” set of materials where two annotators appeared to support the lawsuit, a “con” set where both appeared to oppose the lawsuit, or a “mixed” set where one supported and one opposed the lawsuit. Some students also completed an epistemological style questionnaire measuring attitudes toward knowledge, authority, and individual responsibility on three scales: absolutism, relativism, and evaluativism. Students receiving “mixed” annotations were less reliant on summary than students in the other conditions. Students scoring low in relativism wrote the most rhetorically complex essays, while strong relativists appeared to retreat from the argument. When confronted with “mixed” annotations, strong relativists included significantly more exposition and summary and less argument in their essays than weak relativists. This finding is consistent with research indicating that relativists perform poorly in the face of conflicting opinions.; The fourth study distributed published annotations on academic materials to 17 students, finding no effects. These results have implications for the types of annotations published in composition textbooks. The project ends with design recommendations for annotation technologies and suggestions for further research.