Research Thinking (again)

I've been re-reading my annotated bibliography of reflection research and begun thinking again about how I will research for my own dissertation. All the complicating factors of this research are a muddle in my mind, and I won't try and sort them out right now. The important thing is that I am thinking about this research again. How I define my own questions, goals, and context will determine a lot. I just want to feel out freely the possibilities for this research to see what seems interesting before I work within my box.

One of my goals for this January is to submit a preliminary preliminary dissertation proposal to my committee along with a preliminary book list. This will take a fair amount of work, but I want to get started on this now. Part of my problem in conceptualizing the dissertation project is that I conceive it as a research study. The dissertation is based upon the emperical study of some question. Hence, until I know what my research study will be then I don't know exactly what my dissertation will be focused upon. I know that it most likely will focus on reflective writing activities as a pedagogical technique. How far this teaching technique could be considered a "discursive tool" for the activity of writing is a big question (especially since it is not a "tool" commonly used by most writers). Can I write a dissertation in today's composition context that seems to focus on a teaching technique useful for a GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction) context?

I still come back to a number of key notions
--reflection has a mediating influence on learning and action
--reflection is the heuristic extension of invention within the activity of writing

From those two general assumptions flow my interest.

For now, I will chart out two research study ideas that I had while reviewing the bibliography and doing some recent reading. I'll add them to my list of research designs later:

Study idea #1: Could student self-evaluations/reflections index their growth as writers? Could students growth in meta-cognitive skill be charted over time, and could that growth be matched to their growth as writers? Could you examine a student's reflections over time to see if they indicated growth in writing?

This might be a longitudinal study tracking a student from Eng 0301 to 1301 to 1302 and perhaps even into Soph Lit. I don't like the idea of a longitudinal study for my diss (because of time), but it sounds like an interesting project. You could go down even further into high school or middle school, but it would be hard to get much of a sample over time. This study would be based to a degree upon the correlation between the ability to reflect productively with good writing performance. It would dig more deeply into this correlation to see how this correlation might be developed. The implication is that reflection has a role in good writing, so going back and starting with poor writers might unpack the place and influence of reflection in this writing development. This study would have the large task of validly and reliably measuring writing across time. Hmm...

Study idea #2: How does the influence and sticking power of post-draft reflections compare within an academic and non-academic writing environment? We "think" reflection benefits writers and their ability to revise within a school context--does that same benefit show up in a work-writing environment? Does reflection lead to "double-looping" in terms of learning and writing development?

I got this idea while reading Helen Foster's summary of some post-process critiques of General Writing Skill Instruction and writing process pedagogy in her book Networked Process. She brought up the question of how well the discursive tools we champion in school circulate outside of school. Well, if reflection is a discursive tool we champion that we could examine how it works in school and out of school and compare them.


That's it for now.