Scholarship is published primarily as books, essays in edited collections, and articles in scholarly journals. To locate scholarship, you must use resources such as library catalogues and databases; the major databases and bibliographic resources for finding scholarship in composition studies will be discussed extensively in chapter five of this book.
For Writing and Discussion
1. Consider the issue in composition studies that you want to research as you read this book. How do you expect that the scholarship you locate will help you to better understand this issue?
2. North identifies three types of scholarship: history, philosophy or theory, and textual criticism. When doing bibliographic research in composition studies, how important is it that you find sources that represent all three kinds of scholarship? How might each of these types of scholarship contribute uniquely to your understanding of an issue in composition studies?
Empirical Research
Definition of Empirical Research
When North identifies another methodological community within the discipline as “researchers,” he is referring to those who conduct empirical research studies to build knowledge in composition studies. Because an empirical researcher collects data directly from participants in a study, empirical research is also known as primary research; in contrast, scholarship is sometimes called secondary research because it relies on knowledge gained through other texts, i.e., knowledge a writer gains secondhand. An empirical researcher builds knowledge by collecting and analyzing data, then publishing these results in article-length or book-length research reports.
Though North identified several methods of empirical research in his book, he admitted that his was only a partial list of the methods being used by researchers in composition studies. More complete explanations of empirical research methods being used in composition studies were published in the years following North’s book, in texts such as Lauer and Asher’s Composition Research: Empirical Designs (1988), MacNealy’s Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing (1999), and Blakeslee and Fleischer’s Becoming a Writing Researcher (2007).
Though there are many empirical research designs used in composition studies, most can be classified as being either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative research designs study either a small number of participants (a case study) or a larger number of participants within their environment (an ethnography), and have as their goal the identification of specific variables that describe the participants’ natural behavior concerning an issue related to composition studies. The data in qualitative research are typically descriptive observations; the researcher then uses those observations to state more specific conclusions or findings and to suggest implications for the discipline on the basis of those findings. Two well-known examples of qualitative studies in composition studies are Janet Emig’s case study The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders and Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnography Ways with Words.
Quantitative research differs from qualitative research in that it typically contrasts a treatment and a control group to test the validity of a hypothesis. As a simple example, a teacher may teach one classroom of students as she typically does, while she teaches a different classroom of students using an experimental pedagogy, the “treatment” that she is testing. While carefully controlling for possible interferences to the study, known as threats to validity, the researcher collects data from both groups of students to determine whether the new pedagogy has a significant effect on students’ performance. Findings in quantitative studies are typically reported numerically (rather than descriptively, as in qualitative studies) and often depend on rigorous statistical analyses. Two journals known for publishing reports of quantitative research in composition studies are Research in the Teaching of English and Written Communication. Yet another form of quantitative research is a meta-analysis, which is a study that selects from many prior quantitative studies according to carefully chosen criteria and then statistically consolidates their findings. The most well-known meta-analysis in composition studies is George Hillocks’ Research on Written Composition.
Examples of Empirical Research
For examples of how empirical research contributes to knowledge in composition studies, let us return to the topic of writing across the curriculum. WAC has been the subject of both qualitative and quantitative empirical research studies, and the published results of these studies extend the knowledge about WAC beyond what can be learned from scholarship. Much of the empirical research about WAC is qualitative. Beaufort’s article “Developmental Gains of a History Major: A Case for Building a Theory of Disciplinary Writing Expertise” (2004) is just one example of several case studies that have been undertaken to identify how an individual student learned the complexities of writing in a particular discipline. Other qualitative studies about WAC have focused not on student learning but on faculty development, such as Walvoord et al.’s In the Long Run: A Study of Faculty in Three Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs (1997), which examines the impact of WAC on several faculties’ teaching philosophies and attitudes, teaching strategies, and career patterns. A characteristic shared by many of the qualitative studies about WAC is that they are longitudinal studies, i.e., studies in which data is collected over multiple years.
Although quantitative research studies about WAC are less common, some are available. One example is Beason’s article “Feedback and Revision in Writing Across the Curriculum Classes,” published in Research in the Teaching of English in 1993. This study did not entail a treatment and control group; instead, a total of twenty students were randomly selected from writing classes in four disciplines, and the first and final drafts of these students’ multi-draft writing assignments were analyzed by multiple raters, who coded the feedback students received on their drafts and the revisions that students made. All of the data was then quantified so that precise conclusions could be drawn about the differences in teacher and student feedback on drafts, as well as the relationship between comments and the revisions that students made. Beason also compared the data from this study of feedback and revision in WAC courses to data from other studies about feedback and revision in traditional composition courses.
Beason explains in his article that he chose a quantitative design for his study because of its unique potential to contribute to the discipline’s knowledge about WAC, especially in contrast to the many qualitative studies about WAC that were already available:
Although [prior qualitative WAC studies] are insightful studies, a focused quantitative approach (besides helping create a needed balance in WAC research) allows a researcher to isolate and scrutinize selected phenomena that are affected by many classroom factors but that can still be singled out and examined in and of themselves. Coding such phenomena provides, moreover, a sense of order for complex behaviors and products that seem to be without patterns . . . (406)
He further comments that his study contributes not only to knowledge about WAC but also to knowledge about feedback on writing and revision. Because quantitative studies often analyze data about multiple variables, it is common for a single quantitative study to contribute to the discipline’s knowledge about more than one topic.
Another example of a quantitative research about WAC is a meta-analysis. Bangert-Drowns et al. published “The Effects of School-Based Writing-to-Learn Interventions on Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis” in Review of Educational Research in 2004. These authors quantitatively analyzed the reports of forty-eight previously published research studies about writing-to-learn curricula at a range of grade levels and in