View article

Writing center research has entered an important new era. The surveys and questionnaires that have dominated our inquiry have played a significant role. However, as in the language arts (Athanases & Heath, 1995) and in composition studies (Bishop, 1992), those studying writing centers are choosing qualitative methods—interviews, audio recordings, field notes, among other sources—to describe what happens in writing center sessions. From these descriptions, researchers are proposing theories to explain the phenomena they observe, and are building a base on which our knowledge can be constructed and our practice refined.