Douglas J. Hacker

Environmental, cognitive, and metacognitive influences on text revision: Assessing the evidence

To assess progress in understanding text revision, we review research reported since 1980, when process analyses of writing were beginning (Fitzgerald, 1987). A modernized version of the revision model by Flower, Hayes, Carey, Schriver, and Stratman (1986) was used to organize findings about how revision is influenced by environmentally posed rhetorical problems and actual text variables; by cognitive knowledge, strategies, and representations of the text being revised; by metacognitive understanding, monitoring, and control of knowledge and strategies; by interactions among these environmental, cognitive, and metacognitive influences; and by how working memory limits those interactive influences. These influences have been studied with a rich diversity of research approaches, and even though no part of the modernized model has been studied fully, and even though interactions of the models parts have been examined minimally, clearly interpretable results have been reported about all of the models parts. Substantial and encouraging progress has been made toward understanding text revision, and the stage has been set for more progress. We suggest investigations to increase understanding of revision and to promote integration of research and theory about reading and writing.

The Influence of Overt Practice, Achievement Level, and Explanatory Style on Calibration Accuracy and Performance

The authors measured the influence of overt calibration practice, achievement level, and explanatory style on calibration accuracy and exam performance. Students (N = 356) were randomly assigned to either an overt practice or nopractice condition. Students in the overt practice condition made predictions and postdictions about their performance across 5 quizzes by entering their estimates online just before and after completing the quizzes. Students in the no-practice condition did not enter their predictions and postdictions for their quiz performance. Results did not support the hypothesis that overt calibration practice on the quizzes would improve calibration accuracy or exam performance. Higher achieving students were significantly more accurate in their predictions, yet underconfident in their predictions; lower achieving students were less accurate and overconfident. Approximately 32% of the unique variance from achievement, prediction accuracy, and postdiction accuracy was explained by student explanatory style concerning student-centered factors related to studying and test taking and to a task-centered factor.

Text Revision: Detection and Correction of Errors.

In 2 experiments, independent measures of detection and correction of text errors were examined. In Session 1, Ss tried to detect spelling, grammatical, and meaning errors in a text; in Session 2, Ss tried to correct the same errors in workbooklike exercises. Errors were classified according to whether they were detected in Session 1 and whether they were corrected in Session 2. With the exception of spelling errors, knowledge of how to correct an error was necessary but not sufficient for detection. For spelling error detection, knowledge of how to correct may be both necessary and sufficient. In Experiment 2, detection of meaning errors was manipulated by having Ss answer comprehension questions, surface questions, or no questions. Both question groups detected nearly twice as many meaning errors as the no-question group. Questioning had no effects on detection of spelling or grammatical errors.

An Existential View of Adolescence

Adolescence is viewed from an existential point of view. Incorporating contributions from developmental approaches, the author looks at the development of abstract thought in the adolescent and examines the focus of the adolescents abstract thinking capabilities on the conditions of existence and the conflicts born of them. The author provides an existential paradigm that presents adolescent behavior as the manifestation of the adolescents defense mechanisms developed in response to conflict arising from experiencing the fundamental concerns of existence that all individuals must face. Specific existential concerns dealt with include dread of death, confusion of indecision, hopeless-ness of meaninglessness, and despair of isolation.

Comprehension Monitoring of Written Discourse across Early-to-Middle Adolescence.

Comprehension monitoring is conceptualized as a metacognitive process involving monitoring and control of ongoing discourse processing. The error-detection paradigm was used in an experiment in which 315 7th-, 9th-, and 11th-grade students of low-to-high reading ability monitored and controlled their reading as they searched three times through a text. Search One showed that although all readers failed to monitor many problems, monitoring at lexical, syntactic, and particularly semantic levels increased with age and reading ability. Monitoring for low-ability readers remained low at all three grades. Search Two showed an asymmetry in the effects of instruction to search for errors, and some students exhibited constraints on monitoring and control. Finally, Search Three showed that some students had knowledge necessary to monitor more errors but failed to apply that knowledge to the text.

Calibration research: where do we go from here?

Research on calibration remains a popular line of inquiry. Calibration is the degree of fit between a person’s judgment of performance and his or her actual performance. Given the continued interest in this topic, the questions posed in this article are fruitful directions to pursue to help address gaps in calibration research. In this article, we have identified six research directions that if productively pursued, could greatly expand our knowledge of calibration. The six research directions are: (a) what are the effects of varying the anchoring mechanisms from which calibration judgments are made, (b) how does calibration accuracy differ as a function of incentives and task authenticity, (c) how do students self-report the basis of their calibration judgments, (d) how do group interactions and social comparisons affect calibration accuracy, (e) what is the relation between absolute and relative accuracy, and (f) to what extent does calibration accuracy predict achievement? To help point the way to where we go from here in calibration research, we provide these research questions, propose research methods designed to address them, and identify prior, related studies that have shown promise in leading the way to fill these gaps in the literature.

Self-monitoring support for learning to write

This study examined the role of self-monitoring (SM) support for writing skill improvement in a reciprocal peer review of writing system called scaffolded writing and revision in the disciplines (SWoRD). Based on previous literature on the key role of SM in self-regulated learning, students were provided with opportunities to self-monitor their writing through self-evaluations and peer evaluations on both their own and peer writing. With 601 graduate and undergraduate students from 16 courses in three US universities, we found that the students who developed successful SM dramatically improved their writing compared with those who did not. Finally, we discuss future research in SM of writing.

Error correction in text: Testing the processing-deficit and knowledge-deficit hypotheses

Previous research has shown that writers and editors of all ages and abilities have trouble correcting errors in texts. In this study, we were interested in discovering whether people do not correct these errors mainly because (1) they do not have the knowledge to correct them, or because (2) even though they do have the knowledge to correct the errors, they do not use it. The first case would point to aknowledge deficit, or a deficit at the cognitive level; the second case would point to aprocessing deficit, or a deficit at the metacognitive level. The study compared the number and type of implanted errors corrected by high school and college subjects working on two different texts under three different conditions. We found that, for both ages, the biggest stumbling block in correcting errors was not the knowledge of how to correct them, but rather a failure to detect them: They did not use their available knowledge to find the errors. This processing deficit may be the result of a dearth of available error-finding strategies, or knowledge may not be activated because of lack of motivation or because of a failure to perceive the nature of the task.

The Short-Term and Maintenance Effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Development in Writing for Middle School Students

Our purpose for this quasi-experimental study was to evaluate the short-term and maintenance effects of the self-regulated strategy development writing instructional model by Graham and Harris with 7th-grade students in an urban, ethnically diverse Title I middle school. We compared the writing skills of our intervention students with those of students in a control school. For 5 weeks, we coached teachers at the intervention school in a strategy for persuasive writing. Teachers at the control school also taught persuasive writing but used traditional instruction. We used a pre/posttest design to measure short-term growth, and we collected a maintenance writing score 2 months after the intervention. We used gain scores from pretest to posttest and from posttest to maintenance in a hierarchical linear modeling analysis. We found no differences between the 2 groups from pretest to posttest; however, scores between posttest and maintenance showed that the self-regulated strategy development students scored significantly higher than students in the control school.

Eye Movements and Pupil Size Reveal Deception in Computer Administered Questionnaires

An oculomotor test is described that uses pupil diameter and eye movements during reading to detect deception. Forty participants read and responded to statements on a computerized questionnaire about their possible involvement in one of two mock crimes. Twenty guilty participants committed one of two mock crimes, and 20 innocent participants committed no crime. Guilty participants demonstrated speeded and accurate reading when they encountered statements about their crime and increases in pupil size. A discriminant function of oculomotor measures successfully discriminated between guilty and innocent participants and between the two groups of guilty participants. Results suggest that oculomotor tests may be of value for pre-employment and security screening applications.