Journal 5: Research

In Bergmanns and Zepernicks article on transfer, they are guided by the question
of How students perceived their own process of learning to write and to understand this
attitude among students who are otherwise relatively high achievers and well prepared for
college in terms of academic background and socio-economic indicators(125). After
researching multiple studies on the subject, they found that FYC-to-writing-in-thedisciplines model is little more than an optimistic fiction(126). The authors chose to
overhear focus groups in order to analyze students Own perceptions of how and where
they learned to write and, most of all, what students believe themselves to be
learning(126). Their research was conducted in a type of observational study in order to
avoid bias and make for reliable findings. They put together focus groups that were
representative samples of the population of interest. They found that students perceived
themselves as Agents of their own learning, rather than as recipients of an imposed
curriculum(128). Bergmann and Zepernick utilize Swales Move 1 in the introduction
of their article, for example We repeatedly observed a tendency among students to
actively reject the idea that what they learned about writing in high school or in first year
composition (FYC) courses could be applied to the writing they were asked to do in
courses in other disciplines(124). They go on to establish a niche when they state their
rebuttal for the claim that FYC do not prepare students for writing in other disciplines.