In a highly competitive higher education environment where resources are limited, educators are increasingly concerned with providing evidence for the effectiveness of teaching interventions including one-to-one writing support. This article offers a model for analysing the changes in student writing as a result of individualised writing…

The assessment framework presented here draws on theories of reflective practice and mediated activity to update or "multimodalize" the reflective texts students are sometimes asked to compose after completing an essay. The article underscores the importance of having students assume greater responsibility for cataloging and assessing the…

Meaning making is central to transformative learning, but little work has explored how meaning is constructed in the process. Moreover, no meaning-making theory adequately captures its characteristics and operations during radical transformation. The purpose of this dissertation was to formulate and specify a multiperspectival conceptual model of…

Finds that the updating of situation models is achieved by accessing both locational and temporal links in the knowledge-based spatial representation. (SR)

Two experiments involving 285 college students investigated effects of signaling devices (headings, overviews, and summaries) on text memory. Signals produced recalls better organized by text topics. Results support a model in which signals influence readers' representations of a text's topic structure, which in turn guides recall of text content.…

Describes a model of visual communication which provides a framework for teaching students to analyze and design technical documents as visual systems. Notes that by integrating the writing and design processes, students can adapt visual language to the rhetorical variables of each communication task. (MM)

Explores what it means to think visually and spatially in hypertexts and how users react and maneuver in real and virtual three-dimensional spaces. Offers four principles of visual thinking that can be applied when developing hypertexts. Applies these principles to actual hypertexts, demonstrating how selectivity, fixation, depth discernment, and…

Asks what role miscue analysis might play and how it might be (re)defined, given a view of reading and writing as "complex human activities taking place in complex human relationships." Examines some of the original assumptions underlying miscue analysis, then redefines it by highlighting three aspects of reading and writing:…

Examines relationships between readers' implicit models of reading processes and reader engagement. Notes that a factor analysis produced factors corresponding to a transmission model or to a transactional model. Finds that endorsing a transactional model was related to higher recall of expository text, and that individuals high on the…

Investigates how readers use predication for the interpretation of referents in text and to develop a coherent model of the events described in text. Illustrates how two types of predication (scalar copredication and antipredication) induce readers to disambiguate the referents of definite noun phrases in essentially the opposite way, with…

In what appear to be grand saccadic leaps, research on reader response has turned first, at the beginning of the century, to the external reality of the text; then to the internal reality of the reader; and finally to the movement of the response process itself. Three metaphors derive from the three successive research orientations: from the…

A series of studies investigated the manner in which information is utilized during fixations in continuous reading. Utilization refers to visual information being processed to further the comprehension of the text being read, in contrast to registration, which refers to visual information simply being available to the brain. The studies…

Differing views on how meaning in a literacy event is formed have a large impact upon literacy instruction and language research. Teaching and research are often conducted without considering who is in charge of meanings. Yet the answer to this question establishes an interpretive frame that creates the questions, methods, and findings in language…

Discusses demands users face when searching for information in online libraries of product documentation. Demonstrates how physical libraries provide a helpful metaphor for design. Offers heuristics and a conceptual prototype for facilitating electronic document retrieval. Argues that the search form itself should communicate the way materials are…

Finds that current pedagogical emphases on audience analysis and adaptation in the field of technical writing are based largely on classical conceptions of audience and society. Traces the influences of rhetoricians who challenge the classical model as inadequate or inappropriate for contemporary rhetorical situations. (SKC)