Takeaway #1: focus on research Assessment is not research, and vice-
versa! Our original research design prioritized
institution-focused goals (including all of WIU’s diverse constituencies) over research goals (gathering a manageable amount of relevant data).
If research can help the institution, great. But don’t shape the research in a manner which runs the risk of moving it away from our research agendas—or worse, compromising integrity.
What I hope we’ll do Keep publishing more empirical
research. Publish more scholarship about research
methods and methodology. Write “textbooks” for methods in our
field. Encourage efforts which target mid-
career professional development (like this seminar).
Oppositions defining ease
Generally speaking, these qualities have accreted over time.
quality often opposed tocomfort, enjoyment discomfort, pain,
annoyancetransparency, invisibility, passivity
apparent, visible, active
effortlessness, leisure intensity, worksimplicity complexity, difficultypragmatics, specificity, localization
theory, abstraction, generalization
femininity, attraction masculinity, distancingexpediency, facility deliberation, hard to learnpictorialism literacy
“The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to ‘easy to use,’ but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer.”
Whitney Quesenbery’s “5Es”
Ease-composition connection① Pedagogy: students should find writing
easy. ② Teacher education: teachers should fi
nd teaching writing easy. ③ Rhetoric: students should produce pro
se which is easy to read.④ Societal function: writing is the gatek
eeper to thelife of ease.
Ease-transfer connectionEight habits of mind “essential for success in college writing” from CWPA/NCTE/NWP Framework for Teaching Postsecondary Writing:
Curiosity PersistenceOpenness ResponsibilityEngagement FlexibilityCreativity Metacognition
Research questions Long term (until I die): What is
the relationship between ease and technologies like writing and networked computing?
Short term (3-6 years): What barriers to transfer affect students as they begin writing in the major? Are ease and negotiation among those barriers?
Original research design Preliminary surveys of students in writing
in the disciplines courses Interviews of students and faculty at WIU
and local community colleges which supply WIU with large numbers of students
Case studies of students at WIU and local community colleges
Pilot year in 2011–12; larger longitudinal study with similar methods 2012–2015.
Tentative revised research design Case studies of less than 10 students at
WIU’s Macomb campus, 2011–12 Longitudinal study (methods and length
to be determined) to follow.
Case study components
Diverse data gathering methods should provide the richness of information necessary for research into transfer.
Interviews with students Student-focused analysis of
writing (using stimulated recall) Interviews with faculty Analysis of student writing.
Takeaway #2: focused design
Complex—many techniques to learn
Labor intensive Difficult to
change on the fly.
More focused research technique (interviews)
More manageable workload
Scales down if necessary, or up if desirable.
Original design Tentative revised design
Takeaway #3: method(ology)① What principles can guide our comparisons of
information from different sources?② How can we measure the quality of our
interviews—given the difficulty of research into transfer?
③ How can we be genuinely beneficent to our participants, on the short and long term?
④ What mechanisms can help us apply lessons learned from this study to future work?
⑤ What support structures and resources will help us move the project forward?
THANK [email protected] ~ 309.255.4860
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