PRACTICAL SKILLS FOR WRITING PROCESS RESEARCH IN PRIMARY
AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Aims

The training school provided applied, practical introduction on task design, data capture (keystroke logging and handwriting capture), data processing, and statistical methods for understanding writing processes. Our aim was to provide an introduction to these topics, leaving participants with sufficient understanding to implement the methods themselves when they return to their own research groups. Our focus was on research with school age children much of the workshop content will generalise to adult writers. 

The main topics of the Training School included:

  • Computational Linguistics for complete beginners. Including an accessible introduction to natural language processing in R.
  • Handwriting process analysis, basic theory and hands on practice at segmentation into psycholinguistically-meaningful units.
  • Collecting and interpreting keystroke data from students writing by keyboard.
  • Introduction to data manipulation and statistical analysis using linear mixed e ects models in R.
  • Task design clinic – students develop their own research plans, in teams, and then present these for expert scrutiny

Where

Norwegian Reading Centre at the University of Stavanger (UiS), Professor Olav Hanssens vei 10, N-4036 Stavanger. 

Coordinators

Christer Johansson, Per Henning Uppstad, Vibeke Rønneberg & Mark Torrance

Trainers

Raquel Fidalgo (Professor of Educational Psychology at University of León, Spain)

Guido Nottbusch (Professor of German Primary Education at University of Potsdam)

Mark Torrance (Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University and Adjunct Professor in the National Reading Centre of the University of Stavanger)

Per Henning Uppstad (Professor in the Norwegian National Reading Centre)

Christer Johansson (Professor of Computational Linguistic at University of Bergen)