Hedging in Data Commentaries

Dear Professor,

     Hello. I collect the data related to Regular exam and Makeup exam in your introductory biology course and speculate the reason why there is a big discrepancy between these two exams.

     At first, I will explain the data. These two exams were held in different settings, such as time, number of students, proctors, board examples and room environments, although the difficulty of questions are completely same. Regular exam was enrolled by a five-sixth students (125), and held on Wednesday night with professor’s proctor and the board examples. Also, the exam room temperature was about 20C. On the other hand, Makeup exam was enrolled by a one-sixth students (25), and held on Friday afternoon with the teaching assistant’s proctor. The board examples were not offered in Makeup exam. Also, the exam room temperature was about 28C. To summarize, Regular exam was held with the professors’s proctor and the board examples under the room temperature 20C, although Makeup exam was held with the TA’s proctor and no board examples under the room temperature 28C. Regarding the average score, the average score of Regular exam is higher than that of Makeup exam (86 vs 72/100).

     I would now like to explain prospective reasons for this big discrepancy between two exams. In my opinion, there are three reasons for this. First, board examples in Regular exam might help the students understand the meaning of some questions precisely. Second, the difference of the room temperature. The temperature of Makeup exam(28C) seems to be uncomfortable environment for most students. Third, the difference of the proctor might affect the student’s power of concentration.  Regular exam’s high average score might be caused by these three reasons. However, I did not look into each student’s characteristics between two exams. Thus, I cannot mentioned about the effects of students’ characteristics on these exam scores.  

Sincerely,

Tomoko SUWA

DC metro use

     DC metro use is fluctuated during day, especially each hour. There are two spikes in 8:00 and 18:00 while three dips in 6:00, 16:00 and 20:00. The number of people who use DC metro rises significantly to around 400, reaching the highest point during day shortly after 8:00. On the other hand, the number of people who use DC metro declines to less than 100, reaching the lowest point during day shortly after16:00. These fluctuations seem to be caused mainly by the office workers because the time of two spikes is correlated with opening and closing time of the general office.

Method

     I studied whether the "prevailing myths" that Chinese communities would always look after their elderly was true in the U.S. in this research by the interview. I picked up the ten interviewees, who were my friends or friends of friends, from the large Chinese communities in big cities on the east and west coast. Thus, this was a small-scale pilot study, not enough subjects for any statistical analysis. I collected the data from "semi structured" interviews, which was performed in face-to-face and one-on-one each person for about one hour. In addition, the interviews were held in languages which the interviewees felt most comfortable to use. The languages included Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English.

Dr. Lakoff's Definition of Metaphor

     According to Dr. Lakoff, his definition of metaphor is to describe the concept of specific field using the concept of another field that was acquired by everyday life in childhood. For example, he suggested “cold or warm person” and “prices are going through the roof”. These concepts, such as “cold or warm” and “go through the roof”, are learned from repeated experiences in childhood. These repeated experiences, which often connect with the concept of another field, make metaphor. These repeated experiences activate the circuit of the brain which connects physical experience with another concept.

Citation Theories

     There are many theories about citations. In my opinion, those are generally categorized into two groups. One is the group, which focuses on the intellectual property right of authors. The other is the group, which focuses on the previous achievement.

     The former theories, which are more widely accepted than the latter, propose that citations are used to recognize and acknowledge the intellectual property rights of authors. They are a matter of ethics and a defense against plagiarism. For example, Ravetz (1971) states that citations operate as a kind of mutual reward system rather than pay other authors money for their contributions.

     The latter theories, which are well-established in scientific fields, propose that citations are used to show respect to previous scholars. They recognize the history of the field by acknowledging previous achievements. These theories may include the idea that citation is used as “authority” because “authority” is built up of many previous studies. For instance, Gilbert (1977) states that citations are tools of persuasion; writers use citations to give their statements greater authority.  Similarly, Bavelas (1978) mentions that citations are used to supply evidence that the author qualifies as a member of the chosen scholarly community; citations are used to demonstrate familiarity with the field. Moreover, previous achievements inspire new idea of research because previous studies often have some flaws and provide some questions about topics. Swales (1990) suggests that citations are used to create a research space for the citing author. By describing what has been done, citations point the way to what has not been done so prepare a space for new research.

Short Summary

Hartley et al. analyzed the Abstracts, Introductions and Discussions of 80 journal articles in educational psychology (Every article was taken from Journal of Educational Psychology) to evaluate those readabilities. The computer-based style programs (the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program and Microsoft’s Office 97) were used to evaluate the overall readability of the text as well as of sentence lengths, difficult and unique words, articles, prepositions and pronouns. They adopted the Flesch Reading Ease score (R. E. score) which measures of readability, or text difficulty (R. E. Score 90-100: Very easy 10 years, 60-69: Standard 13-14 years, 0-29: Very difficult Graduate students). This score is calculated based on the lengths of the sentences and words. However, it couldn’t include readers’ motivation and appreciation of the genre which makes academic text readable. Many studies have shown that the R. E. score can be useful despite these defects.

The results showed that the Abstract (mean R. E. score 18.1) scored worst on most of these measures of readability, the Introductions (mean R. E. score 20.5) came next, and the Discussions (mean R. E. score 22.7) did best of all. However, although the mean scores between the sections differed, the authors wrote in stylistically consistent ways across the sections. Thus, readability was variable across the sections but consistent within the authors. They suggest that Abstracts are difficult to write because dense and complex material has to be fitted within a tight word limit. On the other hand, Discussion section requires authors only to comment on what they found and reported in Results section. However, this research is restricted to the data source. Further research is required on the single and multiple authoring in variety of disciplines.

The literature review of Dahl

1.    What’s the broad area of the literature being discussed?

       The broad area of the literature being discussed is Linguistics.

2.    What are some of the sub-topics within this broad area?

       The sub-topics with broad area are Knowledge claims, Academic discourse and Economics.

3.    What are some key issues?

       Key issues are to identify knowledge claims in the introduction section of research articles in economics and linguistics, and to reveal the linguistic differences in the two disciplines’ research article texts.

Do these key issues involve descriptive problems or cause and effect relationships?

 Yes.

4.    Does Dahl discuss theory and/or methodology?

       Yes, she does.

      She mentions two previous studies (Myers 1992, Bloor and Bloor 1993) which proposed each theory. She adapts 50 research articles, 25 from each of the two disciplines, from KIAP Corpus based on three criteria.

5.   What verbs are used to report what others have said?
        state, suggest, imply, indicate, show, claim, propose, argue and describe

6.   What are some of the outstanding questions?
        What is the difference of knowledge claim in Introduction section between linguistics and economics?

7.    What do researchers still disagree about?
     She argues against Myer’s claim that stereotypical statements of kind The purpose of this paper is to mark the main claim of the article.

8. What do researchers now know about the research question?
     Claim is both disciplines tend to be unhedged, but with slightly more hedging in linguistics than in economics. The reason for this is that economics is a more competitive field than linguistics, encouraging explicit signaling
    of new claims in order to attract the attention of the research community.

9. Based on the literature review, what do you think Dahl's study will do?
     I think that Dahl achieved her main goal in this study. Then, she is interested in the different hedging behavior by individual authors. Some authors are more authoritative to use a term from economics in their writing than others.