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It traces the author’s original motivation to understand how underprepared CUNY students wrote, describes the dissertation work Five Writers Writing defended in 1978, and explains how the research approach blended close case observation with controlled conditions inspired by experimental methodology. The narrative evaluates assumptions behind the work and its implications for rigorous writing research.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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central idea drives the author’s view of research and writing?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"Research, like writing, is recursive: moving back to what is known in order to go forward and to decide what to explore next.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"What earlier study does the author reference as the foundation for the revisited work?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"The author points to her 1979 research on the composing processes of unskilled college writers that later prompted a renewed invitation to reconsider its assumptions.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"How did the author design the research methodology for investigating student writing?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"She combined close observation of individual writers with controls imposed at the outset, such as using the same topics and time allotments and conducting sessions in consistent 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\nResearch as a Recursive Process: Reconsidering “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” 35 Years Later  \n [[http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=compforum](http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=compforum)]  \nSondra Perl  \nResearch, like writing, is recursive. We go back to what we know in order to figure out where we might want to go next. Or, said more simply, we go back in order to go forward. This is one of the basic findings about composing that emerged from my study of the composing processes of unskilled college writers that appeared in the December 1979 issue ofResearch in the Teaching of English under the same name.  \nNow, almost 40 years after I conducted this research, I have been invited to revisit that study and to think about the assumptions it was based on. I have been asked to consider what I might have done differently and what of value remains from the work and the approach to research I used. I have been asked, in essence, to go back in order to go forward.  \nThe article I am discussing is a synopsis of my doctoral dissertation, Five Writers Writing, which I defended in 1978 at New York University. During my years as a doctoral student, I was also teaching full-time at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. It was an exciting time to be a new instructor in a newly opened community college: Open Admissions had welcomed thousands of underprepared students into the university, and English faculty across CUNY were trying to understand the task that had fallen into our collective laps. The CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS) had just formed and met monthly, often on Saturday mornings; Mina Shaughnessy was collecting and analyzing thousands of writing samples written by SEEK students at City College {1} [\\#note1] ; and no one seemed sure about the most effective method for teaching writing to this population.  \nIn 1973, as part of my doctoral studies, I read Janet Emig’s groundbreaking study,The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Her work struck me immediately as important, forward-looking, and relevant to our concerns at CUNY. It was obvious to me that those of us teaching writing on CUNY campuses had no understanding of how our students wrote. In other words, we had no knowledge of their composing processes—what they did or didn’t do while writing—and I was excited to think that this topic could be the basis for my doctoral research. I also soon realized that I had a ready and willing population: the beginning writers in my first-year writing course. At that time, there were no requirements for permissions, no IRBs to submit to, no institutional oversight other than that provided by my dissertation committee. I was free to design the study in any way I saw fit to help answer the questions I was asking.  \nI did, though, feel compelled to follow the best methodological advice around. It came from the 1963 text that those of us in the early days of composition held as our bible: Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Lowell Schoer’s Research in Written Composition. Summarizing 504 research studies in order to report on “what is known and what is not known about the teaching and learning of  \ncomposition…[in] a special scientifically based report”(1), the authors famously indicted almost all of them, claiming that the state of research in writing could be likened to research in the chemical sciences in the days of alchemy. The quote is worth citing in full:  \nToday’s research in composition, taken as a whole, may be compared to chemical research as it emerged from the period of alchemy: some terms are being defined usefully, a number of procedures are being refined, but the field as a whole is laced with dreams, prejudices, and makeshift operations. Not enough researchers are really informing themselves about the procedures","cbCaijeEgvWZ2z9r","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaijeEgvWZ2z9r","pdf",35156,"English","# Research as a Recursive Process\n## Revisiting the 1979 study after 35 years\n## From dissertation work to teaching at CUNY\n## Building the research design: method and controls","[{\"question\":\"What central idea drives the author’s view of research and writing?\",\"answer\":\"Research, like writing, is recursive: moving back to what is known in order to go forward and to decide what to explore next.\"},{\"question\":\"What earlier study does the author reference as the foundation for the revisited work?\",\"answer\":\"The author points to her 1979 research on the composing processes of unskilled college writers that later prompted a renewed invitation to reconsider its assumptions.\"},{\"question\":\"How did the author design the research methodology for investigating student writing?\",\"answer\":\"She combined close observation of individual writers with controls imposed at the outset, such as using the same topics and time allotments and conducting sessions in consistent settings.\"}]","Research as a Recursive Process - Reconsidering “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” 35 Years Later | PDF",1792087215]