Second-Order Discourse Synthesis: How Learners Comprehend and Reconstruct Information from Digital, Multimodal Texts

• In Event: Circling Back and Moving Forwards in Digital Literacies Research

Abstract

This poster describes methodological adaptations for discourse synthesis as a research and pedagogical process to understand how learners comprehend and synthesize information across digital multimodal texts. Grounded in a design-based research project on developing teacher candidates’ disciplinary content knowledge about writing pedagogy, the approach integrates cognitive, social, critical, and digital perspectives on literacy. The authors (1) contrast traditional discourse synthesis methodologies with approaches suited to digital source texts, (2) present methods for analyzing learners’ synthesis of multimodal output texts, and (3) demonstrate how tools like MAXQDA and AI platforms expand analytic possibilities, capturing how an ecology of texts mediates comprehension. Ideas shared in this poster offer a new approach for analyzing discourse synthesis aligned to a 21st-century context inclusive of AI, which is critical for researchers as new kinds of discourse synthesis data emerge.

Authors

• Leah Burger, University of South Florida

• Jennifer Schneider, Oklahoma State University

• James R. King, University of South Florida