Assessing Citation Practices in First-Year Writing: A Computational-Rhetorical Approach

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dc.ada.noteFor Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodation, including help with reading this content, please contact scholarshare@temple.edu
dc.contributor.advisorOmizo, Ryan
dc.contributor.committeememberWalters, Shannon
dc.contributor.committeememberMcGrath, Laura
dc.contributor.committeememberSalem, Lori A.
dc.creatorKane, Megan
dc.creator.orcid0000-0003-1817-2751
dc.date.accessioned2024-09-12T19:29:58Z
dc.date.available2024-09-12T19:29:58Z
dc.date.issued2024-08
dc.date.updated2024-08-30T19:05:53Z
dc.descriptionAccompanied by one .zip file : 1) Kane_temple_0225E_171/Kane_Supplementary_Materials.zip
dc.description.abstractExisting research on students’ citation practices has tended to focus on the formal and linguistic characteristics of citation (Howard et al., 2010; Swales, 2014), without fully examining their underlying rhetorical functions or the influence of classroom genres on citation practices. Smaller-scale studies have yielded meaningful insights into the rhetorical dimensions of citation (Haller, 2010), but these have been challenging to scale up, and proposed coding schemes have had limited applicability to L1 first-year writing contexts (Petric, 2007; Lee, Hitchcock, and Casal, 2018; Zhang, 2023). This study responds to calls for a better understanding of the rhetorical strategies first-year writing students employ when citing sources, as well as improved program-level assessment methods to capture their citation practices across classrooms and courses. My dissertation study examines the rhetorical practices of citation employed by students within a foundational academic writing course, ENG 101: Introduction to Academic Discourse, at a large urban research university. Combining qualitative coding and computational text analysis, the study investigates three key research questions: 1) What rhetorical practices of citation do students learn to employ within a foundational academic writing course? 2) To what extent do different genres condition different practices of citation? and 3) To what extent do students' citation practices differ—within and across genres—in relation to the scores they receive? This study reveals that students primarily engage sources for three rhetorical purposes: to Report information from and about sources (without imposing an interpretive lens); to Transform source material through analysis, application, and synthesis; and to Evaluate a source’s content, argument, and/or rhetorical effectiveness. The study found that higher-scoring student papers demonstrated more frequent use of Evaluating sources while lower-scoring papers tended to rely more heavily on Reporting from sources. Additionally, the analysis uncovered distinct citation profiles across the key genres assigned in the course, with the Rhetorical Analysis paper requiring the highest levels of Evaluating and Transforming, the Brand Analysis emphasizing Transforming, and the Review Paper displaying lower overall source engagement. The dissertation contributes to the field's understanding of citation practices in first-year writing, offering a framework for assessing the rhetorical dimensions of student citation that can be adapted for use within the context of local writing programs to support outcomes assessment, curriculum design, and classroom pedagogy attuned to the rhetorical dimensions of source engagement.
dc.description.degreePh.D.
dc.description.departmentEnglish
dc.embargo.lift08/30/2026
dc.format.extent368 pages
dc.identifier.filenameKane_temple_0225E_15775.pdf
dc.identifier.proqst15775
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/10681
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherTemple University. Libraries
dc.relation.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10643
dc.relation.ispartofTheses and Dissertations
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dc.rights.urihttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
dc.subjectRhetoric and composition
dc.subjectCitation
dc.subjectComputational rhetoric
dc.subjectCorpus linguistics
dc.subjectRhetoric
dc.subjectSource engagement
dc.subjectWriting studies
dc.titleAssessing Citation Practices in First-Year Writing: A Computational-Rhetorical Approach
dc.typeText
dc.type.genreThesis/Dissertation
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