10.8 Research essays: Form and content

NOTE:  Class on 10/10 will meet in CAS 304.

We spent class discussing Martin's essay on the rhetoric of teachers comments on student writing.  I didn't write down my notes for this class, so this is an approximation of what we talked about.

Overall organization of this essay
Introduction
Literature review
Current study

                Methods

                Results
Discussion
Conclusions

In our discussion of the overall analysis, we noted that some authors merge some of these sections (for instance, the lit review + the introduction, or the results and discussion, or the discussion & the conclusions), but that this list represents the general order for the "moves" research writers make when presenting their work.
 Categories of analysis for Martin’s paperLength
Type of comment
Use of hedges
Text specificity

As we discussed these categories for Martin's analysis, we noted that the paper might have been stronger if these categories were defined more directly, and earlier in the essay.  We figured out what she meant by these categories by looking at the appendix, and the discussion of teacher tendencies in the literature review.

 What should a literature review do
1. tell what has been found relevant to your question
2. establish your authority/credibility
3. evidence of the importance for your research

What to include in the methods section

Identify your research subjects
Describe the context for the study
Describe how you collected your data
Present your research instrument (survey, interview protocol, etc)Findings for this research
Students did not revise in response to positive comments
Did correct grammar comments
Type was the strongest predictor (more so than features) for student revision

(4 most likely to respond to = list on last page)

This essay also noted a long list of similarities and differences between the present study's findings and Ferris' work.  We observed that the presentation of findings was hard to follow, and made the following observations about different ways to present them.

• don't try to present everything, just points relevant to the focus
• use visuals
• make better use of categories/other organizing ideas to present data (more, larger groupings)

 Suggestions for strengthening this essay

Organization= present definitions/focus before discussing
Create a focused summary of the literature review=> only summarize/discuss points relevant to your focus
Work on the data presentation: don’t present ALL the results, only results relevant to the research question; use visuals; organize data by points about what the data mean

Throughout this discussion, you did some talking/thinking about how to organize/present your research essay.

I really can't remember what I  said to do for Blog 10 when we were in class. I remember that we started to look at Data Set 4 during the last 15 minutes and that we talked about creating research questions that we might ask of this data set. 

For next class:
Blog 10: Name and classify some of the important features of the comments in Data Sets 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 & 4.4 (look through all for essays with comments).  What patterns do you see? What research questions might you ask of this data set?

During net class we will talk some more about analyzing Data Set 4, and I will set you up for collecting data for your research project.