Cinnabar and Alabaster

participants: "the seven students chosen for the intensive study represented the range of students enrolled in the course. four were beginning literature students in their second through fifth semester who had taken only one or no college literature courses….three were more experienced literature students in their sixth through eighth semester who had already taken five or more literature courses" (135); "in addition… a larger sample of students and faculty was also consulted to obtain information about the larger community of which the primary participants were a part. the students included 35 members of the class who completed a survey about functions and audiences…" (136).

instrumentation: (1) writing questionairre: "respondants were given a list of six possibilities and asked to rate each on an ordinal response continuum….they also completed open-ended questions asking about primary and secondary audiences, characteristcs of the primary audience, and their own definitions of the purposes they had indicated were primary (e.g. what does 'demonstrating knowledge' mean to you?). students completed the questionairre twice, immediately after finishing each major writing assignment. the faculty completed it once" (136) (2) participant-observation (she went to class) (3) interviews: "during the first interview…the students were asked to elaborate on their questionnairre responses and interpret the professor's in-class explanation of the assignment….in the first interview, they also complete discourse-based interviews about their first papers….the intervew procedure involved asking each student about specific sections (each ranging in length from one word to a sentence) of his or her paper" (137); "the second interviews…included a second discourse-based interview on this assignment and questions about interviewees' perceptions of the professor's manner of teaching. as one part of the interview, interviewees were given transcripts of the beginning of two class sessions…" (137). (4) analysis of students' writing: using Toulmin's def. of "claims," she examined claims, including "classificatory statements," & "statements that identify an attribute," "inference statements that exlicitly or implicitly refer to an effect" (138), "first" by classifying "them according to types" & then by analyzing "the way the issues were formulated in the less- versus more-successful papers" (where success was measured by researchers' & her grad students' judgments & by the prof's evaluations) (139).