Funds are requested to support graduate student and new Ph.D. travel stipends and three training workshops on cutting-edge methods for research on comprehension and discourse analysis that will immediately precede the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse, to be held in Poitiers, France, from July 11-13, 2011. Discourse analysis can make invaluable contributions to the creation and investigation of effective educational contexts, including the design of instructional materials and technologies, and developing an understanding how students interact with them. Supporting this training opportunity will build critical capacity for future educational research in STEM fields. One of the bedrock questions for STEM education is how comprehension is achieved. A number of methodological approaches in text and discourse processing research can contribute to answering this question. The planned workshops are on a set of methodologies that will advance research on the processes underlying comprehension and intelligent tutors that can support learning in educational settings including STEM domains.
This project supported student training and participation in workshops on cutting-edge methods for research on STEM comprehension and discourse analysis as part of the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse held in Poitiers France. The methods highlighted were the analysis of scripture and eye movements during writing from sources, the analysis of online reading and information search strategies, and the use of multi-language corpora to inform discourse analyses. Discourse analysis can make invaluable contributions to the investigation of effective educational STEM contexts, including the design of instructional materials and technologies, and developing an understanding how students interact with them. This training opportunity and attendance at this international conference helped to build critical capacity for future educational research in STEM education. The Society is an international, interdisciplinary association of scholars who focus on how analysis of text and discourse can inform theory and application informed by many disciplinary paradigms and perspectives including education, communications, human-computer interaction. The workshops served as a training opportunity for both students as well as established researchers who are interested in new methodological approaches, encouraging a methodologically strong and flexible next generation of researchers, and provided networking and mentoring opportunties as participants discussed transformative new approaches to studying comprehension and discourse.
