This article draws on examples of student interviews incorporating multiple modalities to explore the writing lives of students as part of a larger project focusing on participants' experiences of writing within and beyond the university. We explain this innovative, iterative research method combining multiple texts and maps, characterizing it as…

Writing researchers have long sought to make tacit writing knowledge explicit, rendering it available for learning and critique. We advance this endeavor by describing our use of the "tool-based interview" (TBI) as a variation of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington's influential discourse-based interview (DBI). Rather than the product-focused…

Discourse-based interviews allow researchers to gather data about a writer's understanding of what informs a task. This method was essential for a research team seeking to understand the impact of programmatic learning objectives on student writing development. Three decisions in the approach to this research project sought to center the student…