Revision history for MorgansCompTheoryNotes10Oct2011
Additions:
==== Flower and Hayes, A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing ====
A tool for researchers to think with 264
If we can model the cognitive processes, we can
Teach them
Assess them
Assess the teaching of them
Write them as algorithms and procedures
Might also help people produce better writing more suited to purpose.
Very succinct statement of problem but eliminates too much right at the start.
Important for bringing in cog psy
Method
Modeling
Read the exposition with the model:
OV of the Model
The model
* composed from the data of transcripts
Can be useful even if less scientifically used. As a generalized model of problem solving.
#Virtues
* not curric based
* reconceptualizes text-based processes such as drafting and revising as something else.
* observable - sort of
Goals
* they may be embedded in genres
* they may act more as heuristics to generate
Writer runs into problems when, say, the pre-structured demands of topic, or the text, starts to control the process rather than the goals. 269.
> This is a little tough to accept. It demands that there be no struggle. It gives agency to genres and text demands.
A few patterns
they present a few extracts to show coding and model-making - again, as a way of developing research further.
##for this section of reading, consider what we are accepting and not
Do we - as responsible teachers of writing -accept or reject or modify the theory based on WHAT? What will be valid reasons for not prescribe this as a way of understanding composing?
Can't just go w what we like, or dislike, or don't understand.
##Carr et al
This is the kind of cog modeling that Carr and others use when they are concerned about attention, hypertext, multi tasking. We buy into it more than we seem to admit.
Q in this model of how stuff that is translated stored. As language? As image? A semiotic resource?
L is trying to diagnose a BW problem from a cognitive perspective. Addresses a question of how are we to work with BW students - as though they are in a lower dev stage? as though they are not yet forming scientific concepts? something else?
She makes a striking claim: not developmentally up to abstraction and conceptions.
Not a matter of writing but of cog dev.
We need to understand her argument before critiquing it. We often see the same move in Grad students et al as they spend a moment on reading then jump to conclusions based on own values.
Responses?
- Rules of an art and relation to practice
- Knowing how and knowing that
- Apprenticeship
L
is aiming teacher practices at ripening functions. So we need to consider what those are and if they are present in students. Plato as much as Vygotsky and Lunsford.
Openly critiques our use of developmental scale. Sees problem as social one, resting with attitudes and understanding of teachers. Make an argument that parallels Berln, seeing larger matters in writing than just skills.
Remarkably still current, 40 years on.
Based on how dev schemes have been and are still used as power and levers rather than diagnostics. Even curing carries w it a power that needs tempering.
The lesson: look at the task rather than the intellectual development. Offers alternative ways of looking at the problem Lunsford discusses. 296. But she doesn't reject the dev model. Only seeks more research.
The base problem is, we don't know. 295. What should progress look like?
The inflected problem is, who has control of the social demands? Business will tell us. Or Lib Ed. Or the deans. Or curriculum specialists.
Recall Berlin and Shaughnessy: What else do we teach when we teach writing?
BUT
Perry's scheme is about socialization into an academic community rather than a useful model for curric. 305. This scheme is a picture of cultural literacy - white, middle-class, privileged, with art at the top. Students are advised, placed in honors, etc by attitudes towards school work and learning.
A tool for researchers to think with 264
If we can model the cognitive processes, we can
Teach them
Assess them
Assess the teaching of them
Write them as algorithms and procedures
Might also help people produce better writing more suited to purpose.
Very succinct statement of problem but eliminates too much right at the start.
Important for bringing in cog psy
Method
Modeling
Read the exposition with the model:
OV of the Model
The model
* composed from the data of transcripts
Can be useful even if less scientifically used. As a generalized model of problem solving.
#Virtues
* not curric based
* reconceptualizes text-based processes such as drafting and revising as something else.
* observable - sort of
Goals
* they may be embedded in genres
* they may act more as heuristics to generate
Writer runs into problems when, say, the pre-structured demands of topic, or the text, starts to control the process rather than the goals. 269.
> This is a little tough to accept. It demands that there be no struggle. It gives agency to genres and text demands.
A few patterns
they present a few extracts to show coding and model-making - again, as a way of developing research further.
##for this section of reading, consider what we are accepting and not
Do we - as responsible teachers of writing -accept or reject or modify the theory based on WHAT? What will be valid reasons for not prescribe this as a way of understanding composing?
Can't just go w what we like, or dislike, or don't understand.
##Carr et al
This is the kind of cog modeling that Carr and others use when they are concerned about attention, hypertext, multi tasking. We buy into it more than we seem to admit.
Q in this model of how stuff that is translated stored. As language? As image? A semiotic resource?
L is trying to diagnose a BW problem from a cognitive perspective. Addresses a question of how are we to work with BW students - as though they are in a lower dev stage? as though they are not yet forming scientific concepts? something else?
She makes a striking claim: not developmentally up to abstraction and conceptions.
Not a matter of writing but of cog dev.
We need to understand her argument before critiquing it. We often see the same move in Grad students et al as they spend a moment on reading then jump to conclusions based on own values.
Responses?
- Rules of an art and relation to practice
- Knowing how and knowing that
- Apprenticeship
L
is aiming teacher practices at ripening functions. So we need to consider what those are and if they are present in students. Plato as much as Vygotsky and Lunsford.
Openly critiques our use of developmental scale. Sees problem as social one, resting with attitudes and understanding of teachers. Make an argument that parallels Berln, seeing larger matters in writing than just skills.
Remarkably still current, 40 years on.
Based on how dev schemes have been and are still used as power and levers rather than diagnostics. Even curing carries w it a power that needs tempering.
The lesson: look at the task rather than the intellectual development. Offers alternative ways of looking at the problem Lunsford discusses. 296. But she doesn't reject the dev model. Only seeks more research.
The base problem is, we don't know. 295. What should progress look like?
The inflected problem is, who has control of the social demands? Business will tell us. Or Lib Ed. Or the deans. Or curriculum specialists.
Recall Berlin and Shaughnessy: What else do we teach when we teach writing?
BUT
Perry's scheme is about socialization into an academic community rather than a useful model for curric. 305. This scheme is a picture of cultural literacy - white, middle-class, privileged, with art at the top. Students are advised, placed in honors, etc by attitudes towards school work and learning.
Deletions:
Recall Berlin: What else do we teach when we teach writing?
Additions:
=== Related reading ===
==== Cognitive Development and the BW, Lunsford ====
L is following Shaughnessy in looking closely at - theorizing - the situation.
L is trying to diagnose a BW problem from a cognitive perspective. Addresses a question of ow are we to work wit h BW students - as though they are in a lower dev stage? as though they are not yet forming scientific concepts? something else?
task transfer problems -
students have difficulty deriving the abstract principles taught in one situation and applying those to another situation.
example? Use a barometer to find the height of a building
The value of this article is in L attempting to come at BW problems from cog perspective, placing it in Vygotsky - who comp rhet people generally know. She's creating some shared knowledge rather than using idiosyncratic or impressionistic terms and concepts or teacher lore.
So: Vygotsky's idea of concept formation, Piaget's de-centering, Duckworth, and Ryle's idea of the difference between knowing how and knowing that. Chomsky's distinction between performance and competence ... to
students learn by doing and then by extrapolating principles from their process (302)
learning by doing rather than learning by the study of abstract principles - such as
organization
syntax
usage rules
...
Connects all this with Polyani's understanding of social and conventional "rules" - that is, cognitive rules or maxims that need to be integrated into practical knowledge. Ie golden rectangle, or 3X4 rules of composition.
which leads Lunsford to some guidelines for the BW classroom
never teacher-centered
set lectures avoided - mini-lectures used
small workshops of apprentice-like writers
spend time writing, reading what they have written, talking about that writing
how should a teacher prep then?
create assignments and tasks that allow students to exercise in the modes of analytic and synthetic thought continuously
Sample plan - develop as an example of working inductively
note how it is really sequenced to add dimensions to the developing definition -
- This is the principle behind They Say - I Say ... and Ann Berthoff's use of sentence forms. They are not used to simply fill in the blanks but as a device - scaffolding - for induction and analytical thought. As the general maxim that requires real-world situation and practical knowledge.
Essay and whole writing
1- p 307. sets aside the developmental notion of sentence - para - essay. Shaughnessy et al do too. Start with paras and essays NOT to perfect the form but to engage the entire process. By same token, design course to work with analytic modes rather than narrative and descriptive, for which writers already have language prepared.
She illustrates diagnosing a general problem and developing a set of assignments to address that problem 308.
- Discussion on these assignments: keep focused on how it promotes cognitive development rather than reaction and description. It doesn't focus, either, on evaluation but on analysis.
Think it's easy? Try it. Try Writing Assignment A in class -
Related scaffolding: S. Downes's
Aggregate
Annotate
Remix
Repurpose
Share
==== Diving In. Shaughnessy ====
1976: Her attempt to get teachers to re-think what was termed remedial writing at the time - and which was addressed as remedial- and which still is. ENGL 0900. Taught to the handicapped, generally by middle- and HS teachers who, we assume, are re-addressing HS concepts.
- S uses a developmental scale for teacher as an organizing principle - and as a way of slapping at the use of developmental scales. those scales are not neutral, but evaluative - and they carry with them presuppositions about the students we place in them - just as do S's scale terms.
Guarding the Tower
Converting the Natives
Sounding the Depths
Diving In
In doing this, S characterizes the BW's concerns about writing and some diagnoses of common patterns and behaviors.
Could take two foci
look at the characteristics of the teacher
look at / catalogue the characteristics of the BW -
Set S's concerns and conceptions in this essay against Ivory's presentation of Bloom's taxonomy. S suggests we need to look at the task before we assign people to the taxnomy. That is, are students writing the way they are because the rules of the game have changed, and they are still playing the old game? University tak s to explore, carefully, the advancement of formal learning - not just assert opinion without a display of evidence. That is, habit and context, or truley developmental level?
==== William Perry and Lid Ed, Bizzell ====
Cross-talk to Lunsford and Shaughnessy -
Recall Berlin: What else do we teach when we teach writing?
Like Berlin, Bizzell looking at the cultural situation in which we teach writing - which, in this case, she sees Perry as providing a map.
In our context, this is an answer to S's Diving In, who mentions Perry at the end of her article as a matter of developing more sophisticated developmental models for adults. But there are problems.
- Perry characterized the levels by student attitudes towards school-work. Interesting because it seems to make the scale relevant to us. But problematic in that the situation (Harvard: Really?) may be atypicial.
Bizzell's crit: What is Perry actually describing? A natural development? something cognitive? social? universal, or white and western?
Undertakes > the student is aware of positioning?
philosophical assumptions > not cognitive stages.
And so B opens her crit into this scheme as a way of inculcating students into the world view of the lib arts university - p 322 is core. see Inventing the University
The temptation is to align particular writing behaviors - papers the show particular features = with Perry's terms and model.
We can't be sure if Perry's model can provide any explanatory power to writers - that is, Perry's model doesn't explain what we're seeing, which could be coincidental and dependent on other elements.
B recommends against framing curricula on Perry - nor does Perry's scheme tell us much about how we should approach the practice: Do we challenge or nurture a level? Nor does the scheme suggest we can move students along more quickly ...
Perry's scheme describes the effects of a curriculum, but that does not mean we can turn the effects into a model of causes for another curriculum. 325
Value: scheme can help us understand some phenomena in student papers - it's a description of socialization into an academic community. The scheme can provide us with a cultural map of what we're requiring of students entering the community
- it gives us an outside view of what we're demanding and might make visible some of the difficulties students have with our worldview.
==== Cognitive Development and the BW, Lunsford ====
L is following Shaughnessy in looking closely at - theorizing - the situation.
L is trying to diagnose a BW problem from a cognitive perspective. Addresses a question of ow are we to work wit h BW students - as though they are in a lower dev stage? as though they are not yet forming scientific concepts? something else?
task transfer problems -
students have difficulty deriving the abstract principles taught in one situation and applying those to another situation.
example? Use a barometer to find the height of a building
The value of this article is in L attempting to come at BW problems from cog perspective, placing it in Vygotsky - who comp rhet people generally know. She's creating some shared knowledge rather than using idiosyncratic or impressionistic terms and concepts or teacher lore.
So: Vygotsky's idea of concept formation, Piaget's de-centering, Duckworth, and Ryle's idea of the difference between knowing how and knowing that. Chomsky's distinction between performance and competence ... to
students learn by doing and then by extrapolating principles from their process (302)
learning by doing rather than learning by the study of abstract principles - such as
organization
syntax
usage rules
...
Connects all this with Polyani's understanding of social and conventional "rules" - that is, cognitive rules or maxims that need to be integrated into practical knowledge. Ie golden rectangle, or 3X4 rules of composition.
which leads Lunsford to some guidelines for the BW classroom
never teacher-centered
set lectures avoided - mini-lectures used
small workshops of apprentice-like writers
spend time writing, reading what they have written, talking about that writing
how should a teacher prep then?
create assignments and tasks that allow students to exercise in the modes of analytic and synthetic thought continuously
Sample plan - develop as an example of working inductively
note how it is really sequenced to add dimensions to the developing definition -
- This is the principle behind They Say - I Say ... and Ann Berthoff's use of sentence forms. They are not used to simply fill in the blanks but as a device - scaffolding - for induction and analytical thought. As the general maxim that requires real-world situation and practical knowledge.
Essay and whole writing
1- p 307. sets aside the developmental notion of sentence - para - essay. Shaughnessy et al do too. Start with paras and essays NOT to perfect the form but to engage the entire process. By same token, design course to work with analytic modes rather than narrative and descriptive, for which writers already have language prepared.
She illustrates diagnosing a general problem and developing a set of assignments to address that problem 308.
- Discussion on these assignments: keep focused on how it promotes cognitive development rather than reaction and description. It doesn't focus, either, on evaluation but on analysis.
Think it's easy? Try it. Try Writing Assignment A in class -
Related scaffolding: S. Downes's
Aggregate
Annotate
Remix
Repurpose
Share
==== Diving In. Shaughnessy ====
1976: Her attempt to get teachers to re-think what was termed remedial writing at the time - and which was addressed as remedial- and which still is. ENGL 0900. Taught to the handicapped, generally by middle- and HS teachers who, we assume, are re-addressing HS concepts.
- S uses a developmental scale for teacher as an organizing principle - and as a way of slapping at the use of developmental scales. those scales are not neutral, but evaluative - and they carry with them presuppositions about the students we place in them - just as do S's scale terms.
Guarding the Tower
Converting the Natives
Sounding the Depths
Diving In
In doing this, S characterizes the BW's concerns about writing and some diagnoses of common patterns and behaviors.
Could take two foci
look at the characteristics of the teacher
look at / catalogue the characteristics of the BW -
Set S's concerns and conceptions in this essay against Ivory's presentation of Bloom's taxonomy. S suggests we need to look at the task before we assign people to the taxnomy. That is, are students writing the way they are because the rules of the game have changed, and they are still playing the old game? University tak s to explore, carefully, the advancement of formal learning - not just assert opinion without a display of evidence. That is, habit and context, or truley developmental level?
==== William Perry and Lid Ed, Bizzell ====
Cross-talk to Lunsford and Shaughnessy -
Recall Berlin: What else do we teach when we teach writing?
Like Berlin, Bizzell looking at the cultural situation in which we teach writing - which, in this case, she sees Perry as providing a map.
In our context, this is an answer to S's Diving In, who mentions Perry at the end of her article as a matter of developing more sophisticated developmental models for adults. But there are problems.
- Perry characterized the levels by student attitudes towards school-work. Interesting because it seems to make the scale relevant to us. But problematic in that the situation (Harvard: Really?) may be atypicial.
Bizzell's crit: What is Perry actually describing? A natural development? something cognitive? social? universal, or white and western?
Undertakes > the student is aware of positioning?
philosophical assumptions > not cognitive stages.
And so B opens her crit into this scheme as a way of inculcating students into the world view of the lib arts university - p 322 is core. see Inventing the University
The temptation is to align particular writing behaviors - papers the show particular features = with Perry's terms and model.
We can't be sure if Perry's model can provide any explanatory power to writers - that is, Perry's model doesn't explain what we're seeing, which could be coincidental and dependent on other elements.
B recommends against framing curricula on Perry - nor does Perry's scheme tell us much about how we should approach the practice: Do we challenge or nurture a level? Nor does the scheme suggest we can move students along more quickly ...
Perry's scheme describes the effects of a curriculum, but that does not mean we can turn the effects into a model of causes for another curriculum. 325
Value: scheme can help us understand some phenomena in student papers - it's a description of socialization into an academic community. The scheme can provide us with a cultural map of what we're requiring of students entering the community
- it gives us an outside view of what we're demanding and might make visible some of the difficulties students have with our worldview.
Deletions:
Additions:
====== Science! ======
==== Related reading ====
==== Related reading ====
