Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607326248 ISBN 13: 9781607326243

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Points of Departure encourages a return to empirical research about writing, presenting a wealth of transparent, reproducible studies of student sources. The volume shows how to develop methods for coding and characterizing student texts, their choice of source material, and the resources used to teach information literacy. In so doing, the volume advances our understanding of how students actually write.

The contributors offer methodologies, techniques, and suggestions for research that move beyond decontextualized guides to grapple with the messiness of research-in-process, as well as design, development, and expansion. Serviss and Jamieson’s model of RAD writing studies research is transcontextual and based on hybridized or mixed methods. Among these methods are citation context analysis, research-aloud protocols, textual and genre analysis, surveys, interviews, and focus groups, with an emphasis on process and knowledge as contingent. Chapters report on research projects at different stages and across institution types—from pilot to multi-site, from community college to research university—focusing on the methods and artifacts employed.

A rich mosaic of research about research, Points of Departure advances knowledge about student writing and serves as a guide for both new and experienced researchers in writing studies.

Contributors: Crystal Benedicks, Katt Blackwell-Starnes, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, Kristi Murray Costello, Anne Diekema, Rebecca Moore Howard, Sandra Jamieson, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Brian N. Larson, Karen J. Lunsford, M. Whitney Olsen, Tricia Serviss, Janice R. Walker

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tricia Serviss is associate director of entry level writing in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. She has published articles in Writing Pedagogy, College English, Assessing Writing, and Across the Disciplines and chapters in Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines across America and The Handbook of Academic Integrity. Current research projects include a longitudinal study of first-generation college student STEM major literacy practices and longitudinal study of a transdisciplinary faculty development team leading a writing and research initiative to strengthen undergraduate learning. She is a principal researcher of the Citation Project (citationproject.net).

Sandra Jamieson is professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Drew University. She co-edited Information Literacy: Research and Collaboration Across the Disciplines, and Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum (winner of the WPA Best Book Award), and is co-author of The Bedford Guide to Writing in the Disciplines. A Citation Project principal researcher, she has also published on various aspects of student writing.

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Points of Departure

Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods

By Tricia Serviss, Sandra Jamieson

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-624-3

Contents

List of Figures, 
List of Tables, 
List of Appendices, 
Foreword by Karen J. Lunsford, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: The Rise of RAD Research Methods for Writing Studies: Transcontextual Ways Forward Tricia Serviss, 
PART 1: DEVELOPING TRANSCONTEXTUAL RESEARCH PROJECTS, 
INTERCHAPTER 1: What Do We Mean by Transcontextual RAD Research?, 
CHAPTER 1: The Evolution of the Citation Project: Developing a Pilot Study from Local to Translocal Sandra Jamieson, 
CHAPTER 2: Reports from the LILAC Project: Designing a Translocal Study Katt Blackwell-Starnes and Janice R. Walker, 
POINTS OF DEPARTURE 1: Replication and the Need to Build on and Expand Local and Pilot Studies, 
PART 2: BUILDING ON TRANSCONTEXTUAL RESEARCH, 
Interchapter 2: What Does Design-Based Research Offer as a Tool for RAD Research in Writing Studies?, 
CHAPTER 3: The Things They Carry: Using Design-Based Research in Writing-Teacher Education Tricia Serviss, 
CHAPTER 4: Storied Research: Using Focus Groups as a Responsive Method Crystal Benedicks, 
CHAPTER 5: Terms and Perceptions: Using Surveys to Discover Student Beliefs about Research Kristi Murray Costello, 
POINTS OF DEPARTURE 2: Developing Design-Based Local and Translocal Studies, 
PART 3: EXPLORING INFORMATION CONTEXTS, 
INTERCHAPTER 3: What Does Threshold-Concept Research Offer Writing Studies RAD Research?, 
CHAPTER 6: Research and Rhetorical Purpose: Using Genre Analysis to Understand Source Use in Technical and Professional Writing Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch and Brian N. Larson, 
CHAPTER 7: Asking the Right Questions: Using Interviews to Explore Information-Seeking Behavior M. Whitney Olsen and Anne R. Diekema, 
CHAPTER 8: Just Read the Assignment: Using Course Documents to Analyze Research Pedagogy Elizabeth Kleinfeld, 
POINTS OF DEPARTURE 3: Using Existing Research to Think beyond the Local, 
Afterword: Teaching Hybridity in Graduate Research Courses Rebecca Moore Howard, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Evolution of the Citation Project

Developing a Pilot Study from Local to Translocal

Sandra Jamieson

ABSTRACT

The historical narrative in this chapter traces the evolution of the Citation Project from its origins in a graduate seminar to the publication of pilot data (Howard, Serviss, and Rodrigue 2010) and the development of a transcontextual, multisite research project with internationally reported and replicated data. Based on interviews with principal and participating researchers and coders, analysis of research and coding notebooks, two blogs and various shared Google Docs, and e-mails as well as shared personal experiences, this chapter offers a historical account of methodological development that reveals the complexity and messiness of multisite research as well as the necessary adjustments that allow pilot research to be scaled to multisite projects. By being willing to expose not only their methods but also the false starts, challenges, and lessons they learned, Citation Project researchers hope to ease the transition to data-driven research and thereby increase the frequency of information-based policies and pedagogies.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides an antidote to the (necessarily) highly systematized accounts of research processes to which new researchers frequently turn, accounts that in users' minds too easily become ideals to be achieved and standards by which to measure their work. Books such as Johnny Saldaña's (2013), Stefan Titscher et al.'s (2000), and John Creswell's (2014) are invaluable procedural guides for conducting research — and highly recommended — but while they do acknowledge the unruliness of qualitative research, they nevertheless present a linear, cleaned-up version of the process that can leave new researchers at a loss when their own work is stalled. Along with recent calls for writing studies researchers to share their methods and research design (Lunsford 2013), there is also a need for transparency in our field's research narratives. The reality of research, especially data-driven research, is that it is often a very messy, start-and-stop, revise-and-start-over process marked by frustration at many points along the way, as Rebecca Moore Howard and I noted in a keynote to the CCCC Research Network Forum (Howard and Jamieson 2012). Those of us trained in literary or rhetorical research methods are generally ill prepared for the challenges and time-consuming nature of datadriven research, and because it has not been a staple of our field until very recently, many of us lack mentors who can help. Similarly, most of us are unused to working collaboratively on research and writing, something probably essential for largerscale research as our colleagues in the social and natural sciences learned long ago. There are many things to consider before beginning a RAD research project; this chapter presents some of those factors in hopes of encouraging other such endeavors.

Collaborative RAD research is infinitely more rewarding than anyone imagines, though, and, as the other chapters in this book reveal, has the potential to lead to the kinds of changes in pedagogies, policies, and practices many of us desire. I believe research narratives that are honest about failures and setbacks, coupled with the methods and design of the final research projects they engendered, will help researchers — experienced and prospective alike — imagine and plan large-scale research projects of their own. I hope narratives like this one will also help my fellow researchers work through the inevitable messiness and rethinking that brings such projects to successful completion.

The research project that is the focus of this chapter is the Citation Project, specifically a study of eight hundred pages of researched writing produced by 174 students enrolled in first-year writing courses at sixteen US colleges and universities. Researchers coded both the kinds of sources selected and the ways students incorporated information from those sources into their papers (summary, paraphrase, quotation, patchwriting, or copying). They also coded the kinds of sources used, including type, length, and reading difficulty.

The methods and findings of the Citation project sixteen-school study have been described elsewhere (Jamieson 2013; Jamieson and Howard 2013), and documents from that research are included in the appendix to this chapter. My purpose here is not to describe those methods per se or discuss the findings (although I will mention them by way of comparison) but to narrate the evolution of the project's procedures and coding methods over a considerable time and through a series of messy drafts that ultimately allowed the collection and analysis of transcontextual RAD data on a broad scale. Using information from interviews with founding researchers (principal and participating researchers and coders), analysis of research and coding notebooks, two blogs, and various shared Google Docs and e-mails, in addition to personal experience, I will describe the various challenges encountered as the research moved from a series of questions generated in a graduate seminar to a single-institution study, then to a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607326248
• ISBN 13: 9781607326243
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 266
• Herausgeber: Serviss Tricia, Jamieson Sandra
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland