Spring 2023 Conference Roundup

As the Spring 2023 semester wraps up, the Crow team is excited to share the research we have presented at conferences this semester.

WRAB 2023

Dr. Hadi Banat presented at the Writing Across Borders 2023 conference in Trondheim, Norway in February. He presented his research, “Tutoring, Race, and Confidence in Writing,” which is a mixed-methods study that investigates students’ confidence (or lack thereof) in academic writing, the ways students’ racial identities influence their confidence, and how working with tutors in a writing center tutorial could enhance student confidence levels and writing performance. He collaborates on this project with Dan Messier, the assistant director of UMass Boston’s writing center.

During his time in Norway, he accepted a three-dip-dare in the ice-cold water of Trondheim Fjord by another Purdue Boilermaker he met at the conference. Dr. Hope Gerde is a professor in the School of Education and Human Development and the Director of The Texas A&M University Institute for Early Childhood Development & Education. She is also a co-PI of Early Language and Literacy Investigations (ELLI), a collaborative research group from Michigan State University and Texas A&M. Purdue Boilermakers can spot each other from a distance! Conferences are opportunities for networking as much as they are avenues for exchanging research.

Dr. Hadi Banat (left) and Dr. Hope Gerde

SCCI 2023

Dr. Michelle McMullin presented at the 12th annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information at North Carolina State University on Friday, March 10. The symposium consisted of a small group of scholars with a wide range of interests in complex information systems. Dr. McMullin learned a lot about how people are studying public health, ChatGPT, and other language models.

At the symposium, Dr. McMullin shared Crow’s research on Constructive Distributed Work. Symposium attendees were interested in Crow’s research methods, including how we have blended UX strategies like personas with content analysis and mapping. There was particular interest in how we teach collaborative writing through our onboarding methods and mentoring. Crowbird Shelton Weech will be heading a publication related to this work in the fall.

Dr. McMullin debuted Crowbird Anna Shura’s newly designed slide deck template for her presentation. Anna’s designs really brighten up how we present Crow work!

AAAL 2023

Anh Dang, Hui Wang, Dr. Nina Conrad, and Dr. Shelley Staples presented at the 2023 American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in Portland, Oregon held March 17-21. They presented their analysis of a multiple-case study that tracked and explored four participating instructors’ process of implementing corpus-based materials in a university writing course for undergraduate second language (L2) writers during an academic year, focusing on their teaching experiences and feedback.

Using the TPACK framework, they examined how four instructors adapted the corpus-based materials built from a learner corpus, the Corpus and Repository of Writing, to fit their own contexts, taking account of their prior experiences, beliefs, desires, and overall feedback on the materials. The Crow researchers received questions about the materials and how to build the overall corpus that fit within the context of our study, which really highlighted the long-term impact of Crow work.

TESOL 2023

Shortly after their AAAL presentation, the same research team, Hui Wang, Anh Dang, Dr. Nina Conrad, and Dr. Shelley Staples, presented at the TESOL 2023 International Convention and Language Expo in Portland held March 21-24. At this expo, they shared the ways in which L2 students in a U.S. university received and performed by using the corpus-based materials developed by a learner corpus, the Corpus and Repository of Writing, for a summary and response project in an L2 writing course.

The study featured a mixed-method design with student surveys and drafts from both control and experimental groups. From this study, the team learned that the corpus-based materials helped develop students’ awareness and ability to use evaluative language in their summary and response writing. We received questions about our students’ population and context of the study, especially on how this could be helpful for students who came from multiple different disciplines and graduate students. This showed that people were interested in knowing more about the possibility of applying corpus-based materials for their own teaching context.

RESBAZ Arizona 2023

Anuj Gupta conducted a workshop titled “Introduction to Text-mining Using Python” at Research Bazaar Arizona 2023 on Monday, April 17. RESBAZ Arizona is an annual data science festival which promotes data science literacy in Arizona’s research community. Anju designed his workshop for students and teachers in the Humanities and Social Sciences with no prior experience in programming. He introduced participants to basic text analysis techniques like frequency counts, concordances, dispersion plots, and collocations.

The workshop used a computational notebook designed by Anuj, a corpus of texts from the Gutenberg archive, and examples from iconic studies which have used these techniques to answer humanistic and social scientific research questions. Anuj’s work with the Crow lab, especially his internship work where he assisted Dr. Shelley Staples and Mark Fullmer to process student writing for Crow’s corpus using Python scripts, was instrumental in helping him design this workshop. Anuj’s workshop was well attended with close to 30 participants who benefited from learning how to use Python code to analyze textual data.