Abstract of

Traversing the Topical Landscape: Exploring Students' Self-Directed Reading-Writing-Research Processes

Joyce E. Many

Ronald Fyfe

Geoffrey Lewis

Evelyn Mitchell

This 7-month naturalistic study investigated students' reading and writing engagements as they conducted a research investigation related to World War II. Students were free to choose their research topics, to search for and to select from source materials, and to write up and present their findings in their own way. The participants were 11- and 12-year-old pupils in an open-concept school in Aberdeen, Scotland. Data took the form of fieldnotes, photocopies of research booklets and source texts, structured, unstructured, and debriefing interviews, and audio and videotapes. Ongoing data analysis led to selection of key informants whose work sampled the range of composing-from-sources processes which were apparent in this context. Three major task impressions were uncovered: research as accumulating information, research as transferring information, and research as transforming information. These task impressions were characterized by differing emphases on the following research subtasks: planning, searching, finding, recording, reviewing, and presenting. Students did not carry out these subtasks in either a strictly linear or a strictly cyclical pattern. Task impressions were also related to the differential use of the following strategies when working from sources: duplicating, drawing, and labeling, sentence-by-sentence reworking, read/remember/write, cut-and-paste synthesis, and discourse synthesis. The task impressions and strategy use of individual students influenced and were influenced by the materials used and the social and instructional context of the classroom. Students who viewed research as a process of transforming information were more likely to demonstrate a range of strategies which allowed them to traverse their topics from multiple perspectives. [Note: This article is reproduced as chapter 26 of the fifth edition of Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading. http://www.reading.org/publications/bbv/books/bk502/index.html]

Abstract from Many, J.E., Fyfe, R., Lewis, G., & Mitchell, E. (1996). Traversing the Topical Landscape: Exploring Students' Self-Directed Reading-Writing-Research Processes. Reading Research Quarterly, 31(1), 12–35. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.31.1.2