My Dissertation
My dissertation examines theories, methods, and approaches that professional writing instructors use to give feedback on student writing. I am interviewing instructors about their values, goals, and feedback-giving practices, then comparing these interviews to a content analysis of instructors’ comments on their students’ work. I have found that while these instructors said that their feedback focuses on purpose, audience, and genre, most of their comments transmitted information about students’ mistakes. To fund this research, I received the Marty Baker Graham Research Award from the Association for Business Communication. My research brings attention to teaching methods in professional writing to ensure effective, data-driven approaches that prepare students for workplace writing.
Other Research
In my other research, I interrogate communicative disconnects in writing, technologies, and communication strategies using qualitative methods. Examining people’s different perceptions of the same event or artifact has propelled my research into several areas: communication breakdowns in midwifery, theoretical frameworks in business communication textbooks, how instructors organize learning management systems, and types of learning afforded by competency-based education. From my dissertation, I am preparing articles for the Journal of Business and Technical Communication and Business and Professional Communication Quarterly. For my second major project aimed toward Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, I will examine epideictic rhetorics of praise and blame that midwives use to persuade women to homebirth.
Usability
My research in usability centers around the ways in which students and instructors use Learning Management Systems (LMS). My results revealed that instructors think about their LMS in four main ways: as an extension of the physical classroom, as a homework hub, as an online syllabus, and as an online workshopping space. My research has built on these findings by using content mapping (Rosenfeld and Morville, 2006) to map how differing instructor attitudes toward learning management systems could influence how instructors structure their LMS tools and spaces.
A copy of my recent conference presentation “Becoming a Power User: Making Meaningful Learning Management Systems” is available here: