Research in the Writing Center- McKay

I felt this chapter was more of a crash course in how to do research on a basic level and less about why writing center research is important or what major shifts in thinking have happened out of writing center research. The latter is mentioned, but I felt like the chapter didn't really dive into that.
For instance there is this rather tautological statement: "research offers you the opportunity to think through and research your ideas" (123). Research is a formalized conversation, and it is this conversation among writing centers (and libraries and counseling centers and probably all student-centered campus groups) that I'm most interested in right now. This overlaps with quantitative and qualtiative research but it is more a question of how to connect conversations happening at different universities or in different place in the university together. I'm most curious now to do a tour of some other university writing centers and see what they are doing well and to do some experiments, along the lines of what Lei was saying, in bringing some of these other campus groups into conversation. But anyway...here are some things I think it would be interested to collect info on...

I'm very curious about student own conceptions of writing/research. I think it could be very interested to do some sort of textual analysis of students response to self-as-writer or another prompt that asks a student to figuratively describe the writing / research process and then see if there are specific metaphors or themes that crop up.

Along those lines, I'm interested in the threshold concepts that it seems like a lot of first years have yet to grasp about academic writing or writing in general, and I wonder when we somehow magically grasped some of these concepts on our own. I think it could be interesting to try to track when some of these "ah ha" moments for students happen, how they describe them, and if they can be manufactured with relative consistency with a certain explanatory device or assignment.




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