Possible questions???

sorry if this is cheating, but i'm cross-posting a section of something i wrote over at my place. i was doing some thinking today and came up with some stuff that i'd put out there for you, my fellow dissertators, to possibly comment on. here goes:

so, anyway, i finished reading the final sections of PITF [Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson] today and it got me a thinkin about possible diss r-s questions i could realistically aks. i want my inquiry to be both simple and useful/applicable to pedagogy. i'm not abandoning the student-athlete ideas. however, the questions i came up with today while musing in the aftermath of PITF had little to do with student-athletes. the questions are just rumination residue, so i shouldn't worry that my student-athletes are going to be left in the dust (right?). well, i don't know. anyway, the subject pool shouldn't/doesn't matter as much as the usefulness of the question guiding my research (i think). especially if i'm able to construct a study that investigates my hypotheses about physicality and effective learning (phenomenological learning practices). here's what i came up with:

Is there a relationship between the amount of writing done in high school and the level of achievement reached in fyw?

Or

Is there a relationship between the physical act of composing and writing ability?

Or

Does one have to physically compose a text in order to acquire an understanding of how to successfully navigate a written discourse community?

Or

What is the relationship between actually composed text and achievement in college-level writing courses (FYC)?

Or

Etc.

Basically, the idea is based on an epiphanal moment while reading Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations wherein she discusses the discrepancy in the amount of physical engagement with writing texts between “traditional” and “open admissions” high school students. Of course we know that there are correlations between the amount of responded-to-writing that one does and their improvement as a writer over time. (We do know this, right?? Or is this simply an assumption??) My argument, before beginning the research anyway, is that the writing improvement comes as much from the feedback as it does from the phenomenological experiencing – i.e. the physical act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. How I could test for this (experimentally) could be by assigning one group of students a shit-load of writing that gets no feedback, no grade, simply writing (e.g. frequent posting to blogs such as I assigned last semester) viz. a more traditional classroom wherein there is no blogging, only 4 major papers plus the process-writing documents associated with such writing. The measure would be a pre- and post-test in the form of in-class or take-home essay assignment… btw, the difference between the control group and the blogging group would be, simply, the blogging requirement.


this is all still pretty fresh and i still have two huge chunks of PITF to read. i'll decide what to make of this in the moments/days to come. in the meantime, i think i'll cross-post this over at dissertation boot camp to see if any of my fellow dissertators have any thoughts on the matter. in the meantime, as usual, i welcome the insights of you sage folks out there being all lurkerly.