FIELD-DEPENDENCY AND WRITING

This is a piece I wrote in response to Mike Rose's Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism. In his article, Rose challenges the merits of traditional I.Q. testing, and instead attempts to sort behaviors according to cognitive mindset. Rose proposes that people are either field-dependent (relying on context in analytical situations) or field-independent (able to analyze a particular item without background context). 

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In my paper, I replicated Rose's cognitive tests on my roommates, who had never been exposed to any of this beforehand. I then asked them to describe their writing processes, to see if field-dependency somehow influenced the writing process. The results were somewhat unclear.