Megan Kane Doctoral Defense - Friday, 5/3 at 10 AM via Zoom
Committee: Ryan Omizo (Chair), Shannon Walters, Laura McGrath, Lori Salem (Temple University Student Success Center)
Title: Assessing Citation Practices in First-Year Writing: A Computational-Rhetorical Approach
Abstract:
My dissertation responds to the need for a better understanding of the rhetorical strategies first-year writing students employ when citing sources (Petric, 2007; Lee, Hitchcock, and Casal, 2018), as well as improved methods for assessing citation practices across classrooms and courses (Scheidt and Middleton, 2021). Combining qualitative coding and computational text analysis, the study explores the rhetorical citation practices of students within a first-year writing course at a large urban research university. My study is guided by three questions: 1) What rhetorical practices of citation do students learn to employ within foundational academic writing courses? 2) To what extent do different genres condition different practices of citation? and 3) To what extent do students' citation practices differ—within and across genres—in relation to the scores they receive?
Results of my study indicate that students primarily engage sources for three rhetorical purposes: Reporting information, Transforming source material through analysis and synthesis, and Evaluating sources’ argumentation and rhetorical effectiveness. Higher-scoring papers demonstrated more frequent Evaluating, while lower-scoring papers relied more heavily on Reporting. The study also illuminated distinct citation profiles students used to meet genre expectations. Ultimately, my dissertation advances understanding of citation practices in first-year writing, and it presents a computational-rhetorical framework for assessing student citation that can be adapted by local writing programs to support outcomes assessment, curriculum design, and classroom pedagogy focused on the rhetorical aspects of source engagement.
Contact tara.lemma.diffley@temple.edu for the Zoom link!