EASE & NEGOTIATION: BARRIERS TOWRITING TRANSFERBradley Dilger ~ Western Illinois U

Visualizing our seminar

1. My institution2. Our field3. Ease4. Research design5. My questions

Five sections

1. My institution

Me and WIU

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.

2. Our field

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).

3. Ease

Staples: Easy button

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 and textbooks

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

A. OriginalB. Tentatively reshaped

4. Research design

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

5. My questions

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 YOUcb-dilger@wiu.edu ~ 309.255.4860