Redefining Revision for Freshmen

This study investigates the impact of task definition on students’ revising strategies. Our primary aim was to determine if freshman students could revise globally if instructed to do so and if those global revisions would result in improved texts. We asked two groups of freshmen to revise a text provided by the experimenters; one group was given eight minutes of instruction on how to revise globally, and the other was simply asked to make the text better. The texts written by students who received the instruction were judged both to be of significantly better quality and to have included significantly more global revision. Further, the improvement appears to affect the treated population generally rather than just a small part of that population.