What's the Nicest Way to Tell Students They're Wrong?

[AvidReader]

The student comment mentioned an example in which I said something like "I don't think that's what the authors meant. What they're trying to do here is..." in response to one of their explanations. Student didn't give an example of how they would have preferred me to correct them.

[. . . ]

She pointed to one instance in which a student gave an incorrect explanation and I said "Actually,..." and told me I shouldn't have said "actually". I didn't even realize that could be considered harsh. She said, "Praise them for the part they got correct before pointing out what was incorrect." but didn't have an answer when I asked how to respond when the student doesn't get any of the parts correct...

What are some better ways to correct a student?

I like Hegemony's suggested dialogue very much indeed, and it would probably be my default. In fact, asking them to use a few quotations from the text to support their synopses might be useful in the first round, because then you can start from the quotation ("That's a great quotation to choose! Let's look at what it says more closely . . .") as a way of affirming something positive.

Depending on what they have wrong, and how long you want to spend discussing it, you might also offer the correction as additional information. For instance, "Yes, [that topic] does seem quite prominent in this essay. It might be helpful for you to know that this article was written shortly after [another article / breakthrough in the field / etc.]. In fact, the authors would have been writing this because / after / in response to [explanation or context]. Now that you know this context, is there another way you could interpret [whatever they have wrong]?"

AR.

[Aster]

I once thought it would be really awesome to have custom, rubber-dye stamps made for grading papers.

"Spelling"
"Grammar"
"Word Choice"
"Incomplete"
"Unclear"
"Sentence Fragment"

But then I took a job at an institution that doesn't assign writing work, and all my dreams were shattered.

[writingprof]

OP, you seem like a caring and thoughtful teacher. But this thread! Seriously, people, do you think the ChiComs are falling all over themselves to avoid pissing off the student "customers"? One wrong answer, and they cast you down to the salt mines. Here is the answer I use every time a student is wrong: "Sorry, but no." Never had a complaint in twenty years.

[Cheerful]

Here is the answer I use every time a student is wrong: "Sorry, but no."

+1 Sufficiently gentle and sympathetic ("sorry"), concise, and ethically focused on accurate learning.

She pointed to one instance in which a student gave an incorrect explanation and I said "Actually,..." and told me I shouldn't have said "actually".

That's hilarious.  "Actually" is now a banned word?  Sorry, but no.

[Hegemony]

I think we're underestimating how normal and common it is to be deflated when you speak up and are flat-out told you're wrong. Even if it's snowflakish, even if it's undesirable — it's just normal human behavior. And do we want to encourage students to take risks and offer their thoughts, or not to speak up unless they're 100% sure they're correct?  Telling a student they're wrong in so many words positions the instructor as a judge instead of a knowledgeable partner in learning.  It's especially likely to squash female students, who have been found to be more self-critical.  So do we want a class where only the blowhard boys (not even the more self-critical boys) feel confident enough to speak up?

I remember this well from my own education. I was not a shrinking violet and I was pretty motivated, as you can tell by the fact that I am still in academia. I loved the classes of one of my professors — it felt like a collaboration where we were all working together at interpreting the material. She would get so excited when someone made a breakthrough, and if someone was on the wrong track, she'd still be very interested in their thinking and their approach.  By contrast, in my first year I had a professor in the same subject whose approach was "Guess what I'm thinking."  She would say, "Who has an idea on what the theme of this text is?" "Um, redemption?" someone would offer. She would respond, "No."  Then a long silence while she looked around the room for the person who could get it right. Early on in the year she said something like, "This text is about opposites. Everything in it is an opposite." I said, "I don't understand how this passage is an opposite?  Is it actually a positive?"  "No," she said, "It is not." And that was the first and last thing I said in that year-long course. I just shut down completely.  I felt no motivation to say anything further, and just wanted to get the credit without attracting her attention again.  Now, you could say, "But aren't you just a little snowflake who shouldn't be coddled?"  Maybe so. Nevertheless it shows that you get what you encourage. The first professor encouraged excitement and exploration.  The second professor encouraged fear and silence.

[scamp]

Yes to all that Hegemony said. I try to be gentle when students are off course because most of them are being brave by even putting forth an answer out loud in front of the class at all. That's a scary thing to do (I still get anxious when I ask questions at conferences and seminars). If I want them to keep doing that, then just going "Nope, who next?" isn't going to help with that (I know that isn't what the OP is doing, but it might have the same effect).

[secundem_artem]

You don't actually have to tell students they are wrong.  If somebody gives a "WTF???" answer, I do one of the following:

1.  Ask the student a series of questions they can answer that will lead them to the correct answer.  Let them get there themselves and you really don't need to say, "That's incorrect."

2.  Acknowledge the response and ask for the thoughts of other students.  If I'm lucky I'll get 1-2 other responses and we can do a compare and contrast on the various answers, which again, just leads the class to the "correct" answer.

Some of this is probably field dependent.  Most of the things I teach have numerous answers of varying degrees of "correct".

[mythbuster]

While I appreciate the good intentions of all these comments, I will also offer that "condescending" and "intimidating" are also stick student comments for any professor who makes the students actually think deeply about their field. Especially if you are a woman and don't give off the warm, cuddly and nurturing vibe.
    I get these all the time. I used to really worry about them, to the point where I had faculty reviewing how I interacted with other students. Then someone pointed out that I don't ever just answer student questions directly, but rather work to break the question down to get to the root of the students missunderstanding. I generally do this one on one in office hours, so not in "public". But this level of depth is more than the students expect.  So now I  don't worry about quite it so much.

[Parasaurolophus]

Others have mentioned a lot of good strategies already! I'll just add this one, which I use a lot when I'm teaching formal material: when the student volunteers a wrong answer, I'll say something to the effect of "not quite, but that's a great guess!" and then I'll explain why it's a good guess, try to reconstruct the reasoning behind the answer, show them everything that was going right with that guess, and finally show them where it went wrong.

Other times, I'll exercise my political muscles and just ignore the wrongest part of the wrong answer and deflect towards a right(er) answer. You can often paraphrase a wrongish answer into a rightish one.

[writingprof]

Here is the answer I use every time a student is wrong: "Sorry, but no."

+1 Sufficiently gentle and sympathetic ("sorry"), concise, and ethically focused on accurate learning.

She pointed to one instance in which a student gave an incorrect explanation and I said "Actually,..." and told me I shouldn't have said "actually".

That's hilarious.  "Actually" is now a banned word?  Sorry, but no.

I have now died of happiness.

[Puget]

Other times, I'll exercise my political muscles and just ignore the wrongest part of the wrong answer and deflect towards a right(er) answer. You can often paraphrase a wrongish answer into a rightish one.

I do this a lot as well-- generally I'll say something like "I think what you're getting at is. . ." and then reframe what they were saying into something correct and build on it. The student is generally visibly relieved and gets to feel like they had a kernel of smartness in their idea, which hopefully helps them learn rather than feeling shut down.

[spork]

While I appreciate the good intentions of all these comments, I will also offer that "condescending" and "intimidating" are also stick student comments for any professor who makes the students actually think deeply about their field.

[. . .]

I get comments like "racist," because I inform students that they are sloppy writers, which indicates sloppy thinking.

A large proportion of students that I see come out of high school having been trained to think that memorization of facts equals learning, while discussion, debate, and analysis does not and is thus a waste of time, and how dare someone in a position of authority try to punish me because I'm too lazy to support my opinions with evidence. Everyone knows that memorization is what equals a degree, which equals a career that pays six figures per year right out of college.

[Hegemony]

The thing about saying someone is a "sloppy writer" is — what's actionable about it?  What exactly about the writing is not doing what it could, and how could it be fixed? It may seem obvious to us because we've learned it all. "Surely they can see that point A is not connected in any way to point B! They're just being sloppy!" But the point of education is not to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down — it's to help them understand what makes good writing, and help them get from where they are to a better version. That takes a lot of really explicit, detailed instruction. The word "sloppy" isn't instructive. Or I'll say it this way: actually, reprimanding a student that way is sloppy. (There, did that last sentence make my point persuasive and helpful! It should have, right!)

I am not black myself, but I went to a high school that was nearly all black, the worst-funded inner-city high school with the worst teachers you can imagine, plus a few valiant angels working hard to try to make what difference they could. But it was the kind of high school where not only were drugs sold openly in the math classroom, but the math teacher was buying them. (He was white, by the way.) That any student graduated from that high school able to read, much less write, was a miracle — and most of them did not. I remember at one point the state instituted a law that graduating seniors , that is, 12th graders, had to pass a test that showed they could read at the 6th-grade level.  They had to discontinue the test because so many seniors were failing it.  Of course increased funding for the schools, money to attract better teachers, actual classrooms (most of the school was in trailers) — those was not forthcoming. Everybody was just supposed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Anyway, some kids did plug away at it and graduate and get themselves into the local community college. I was in the writing class with them at the community college. The instructor advised most of them to quit. "Your writing is so bad it can't be fixed," he told them. "If you're not even going to try, there's no place for you here."  Was that racist?  Probably not in intent, but in effect. Because those kids hadn't stood a chance anywhere along the line.  Now, it's certainly a scandal where they get to college and they're expected to do college work and they've had no effective teaching at any point. But they're not "sloppy." They're complete beginners.  They need massively intensive tutoring, and the system most likely still doesn't have the resources. I do think seeing their work as "careless" is not to have perspective on the bigger picture. Maybe Spork's "sloppy" racism-charging students all come from upper-middle-class school systems where they've had access to good teachers and tutors and all.  My guess is that that's not the case. Whether or not, I still think teaching is probably a more effective route than labelling.

[ergative]

I inform students that they are sloppy writers, which indicates sloppy thinking.

Thinking and writing are two entirely different skills. I remember regular conversations in the old fora about how we were frustrated that students couldn't understand that we grade their work, rather than their effort, which is why 'but I worked so haaard' doesn't equal a good grade. But if they're being told that the quality of their work indicate something about the quality of their mind, it's less surprising that they conflate grades and effort, given that this sort of statement explicitly conflates it for them.

The 'racism' claim is on its surface absurd, but it's not hard to see where it comes from:

1. Non-white students tend to have worse schools and worse training in writing (see Hegemony's post)
2. Non-white students, by virtue of their less skilled writing, get told that they are sloppy thinkers more than white students.
3. Non-white students hear professors tell them that they are dumber than white students. (yes, that's not what the profs say, but it's what the students hear.)

I think this is an example of why societal racism is so hard to talk about: It's not about individuals with racist attitudes. I'm pretty sure Spork doesn't think that their black students are dumber than their white students. It's about the consequences of a system that privileges some demographics over others. But it's hard to point a finger at a system, especially when the consequence of that system is standing in front of you and telling you that you're dumber than your white peers.

It's the same mechanism as the whole 'actually' kerfuffle. There's nothing wrong with using the word 'actually'. There's nothing wrong with Spork. But both of them represent the unintentional means by which a larger problem is instantiated. 'Actually' has become a symbol of condescending and dismissive rhetoric, and students don't like to be treated with condescension and dismissed. Saying that students are sloppy thinkers will hit black students more than white students in proportion to their demographically unequal access to secondary education. It's going to feel racist, because it is the product of a racist system.

I think we're going to be faced with these sorts of misplaced accusations for as long as the system itself operates this way. I don't have a solution for it, other than to be sensitive to how our actions feel to students. And also to remember that there was never a 'good old days' when people were less sensitive. There were only 'old days' when people were less confident about speaking up, and quietly quit and went away rather than challenging problematic behavior.

[spork]

I should have been more specific:

• Undergraduates here are overwhelmingly white, middle middle to upper middle class, suburbanish. Those are the ones who label me racist, etc. -- an attempt to blame me for the fact that their work is mediocre and demonstrates laziness. The working class, immigrant, non-white students in general have a better work ethic and don't assume they're perfect.
• I don't say or write "sloppy." But if a student's writing has sentences consisting of comma splices, four dependent clauses without a verb, no capitalization of the first word, misspellings, etc., then I'm going to respond with "This has many writing errors and does not communicate an understandable argument." And if a student in class says the equivalent of "When the witch was feeding Bojack Horseman and Kermit the Frog to fatten them up before putting them in the oven, they should have realized they were in danger," then I'm going to say the equivalent of "those characters aren't in this story; I have no idea what you're talking about."
• Twenty-five percent of the undergraduates here major in business, a department where most faculty do not have reputable credentials and/or are past graduates of the university. No writing is needed to complete that major.
• A large portion of the white male students attend primarily to continue playing the sport they played in high school, even though doing so will end up costing them the equivalent of a house they will never live in.

While I appreciate the good intentions of all these comments, I will also offer that "condescending" and "intimidating" are also stick student comments for any professor who makes the students actually think deeply about their field. Especially if you are a woman and don't give off the warm, cuddly and nurturing vibe.
    I get these all the time. I used to really worry about them, to the point where I had faculty reviewing how I interacted with other students. Then someone pointed out that I don't ever just answer student questions directly, but rather work to break the question down to get to the root of the students missunderstanding. I generally do this one on one in office hours, so not in "public". But this level of depth is more than the students expect.  So now I  don't worry about quite it so much.

+1