At a glance:
Strategies
to improve ged ed
Writing-in-the-major
courses: what are they?
Workshop
for writing-in-the-major courses
Assessing
the work of the Writing Center
Uhalde
and peer review
Minor and
a writing-in-the-major course for sociology
Strategies to Improve General Ed (top)
The following list appeared on a general education assessment report the University of Cincinnati prepared for a North Central Review. Writing activities undergird most of the criteria.
Writing-in-the-Major Courses : What Are They? (top)
As a result of the writing
across the curriculum movement, many universities and colleges have established
“writing in the major” courses. The University of Missouri—Columbia
boasts one of the nation’s premier programs (go to http://cwp.missouri.edu/
for details).
According to MU’s Campus
Writing Board, which regularly assesses writing-in-the-major courses, the
most successful ones:
Moreover, other departments are now expressing interest in the same type of course for their own majors. Psychology recently proposed PSYC 306: Research Writing and Design in Psychology, a course that will professionalize students in such writing tasks as article critique, literature review, question construction, hypothesis formulation, prediction, theorizing, and determining research design. Technology is exploring how to convert TECH 302: Graphic Presentation and Communication into such a course, emphasizing project design and group authorship.
Writing-in-the-major courses significantly strengthen a department or program. The more these courses are positioned in the disciplinary curriculum, the more students are likely to develop the professional writing skills employers seek.
Clifford Mirman, Chair of Technology, notes that Chicago employers have already done a direct comparison between NIU and other university job candidates, identifying the need for a concentrated curricular focus on writing to help our students gain the competitive edge.
Workshop: Designing Courses for Writing in the Major (top)
Mark your calendars! A two-day workshop on designing a writing-in-the-major course will take place after spring semester, May 23-24, 2002. Enrolled faculty will collect a wealth of resources for transforming one of their courses.
The workshop provides a copy of Becky Howard's and Sandra Jamieson’s Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines. Participants will discover how to promote critical thinking through writing, how to design effective writing assignments, how to provide feedback that balances content and correctness, and how to create rubrics that enable students to grasp what faculty want them to accomplish.
A stipend of $500 accompanies workshop participation. Some colleges and departments have offered matching funds for their faculty who transform a course.
Go to http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/wmworkshop for more information.
Writing Center Assesses Students’ Drafting Skills (top)
During 2000-2001, Writing Center staff conducted 3,800 conferences—1,654 in the fall and 2,146 in the spring. Students from all colleges excluding Law were represented. 1,401 individuals participated—552 freshmen, 152 sophomores, 362 juniors, 183 seniors, 96 graduate students, and 56 status unidentified. Many were return visitors.
Of the 1,401 students who visited the Writing Center, 278 students accrued three or more visits, including 83 freshmen, 45 sophomores, 98 juniors, 33 seniors, 15 graduate students, and 4 status unidentified. The majority of these 278 repeat visitors brought in drafts for more than one course or content area. Writing Center staff accounted for 1,529 of their drafts—a total of 458 student enrollments in the content areas.
Senior Writing Center staff (director, instructors, and GAs trained in calibration) read and ranked the 1,529 drafts from the files of the 278 repeat visitors. The number of drafts per repeat visitor ranged between 3 and 37. This range suggests an average of 5.5 drafts per repeat visitor. 277 of the repeat visitors’ 1,529 drafts were multiple revisions of papers that the students had already discussed with a tutor. The number of multiply-revised papers per file ranged between 1 and 9, and repeat visitors averaged one multiply-revised draft per file. “Improvement” was defined according to four categories in the following rubric:
Because this report focuses on 1,529 drafts—not on final written products—it cannot confirm a definite correlation between repeat visits and improved writing. Still, resulting tallies seem suggestive. Highest overall improvement occurred in development, averaging 2.46. Overall improvement in organization averaged 2.34. Overall improvement in rhetorical strategies averaged 2.29. Lowest overall improvement occurred in conventions (e.g. grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, format, documentation) with an average of 1.97. General overall improvement averaged 2.27.
The research supports results and implications of the large-scale writing exams that Assessment Services administered to a cross-section of NIU juniors from 1998-2000, implying that students’ writing abilities will develop only if they receive on-going instruction and practice in writing beyond First Year Composition.
Uhalde Includes Peer Review in Revision Process (top)
Kevin Uhalde recently invited Writing Center staff to help him incorporate peer review in an assignment for his sections of HIST 110: Western Civilization. The technique of peer review reduces time that faculty spend responding to papers. Students enjoy it.
Uhalde’s students came prepared with a draft of their assignment. They exchanged their drafts with a partner who was required to respond to these five items:
Minor Encourages Writing in the Major (top)
Bill Minor’s SOCI 289: The Criminal Justice System not only gives students ample practice in writing, but it also gives them useful instruction in how sociologists write. Students turn in a large term paper at the end of the semester, but Minor breaks down the project in stages throughout. His feedback often comes in the form of a letter to all, identifying successes and places where improvement is needed.
A one-paragraph summary of the student’s topic comes early, modeling the form of an abstract. Then comes an annotated bibliography, enabling students to sharpen their knowledge of ASA documentation, along with helping them to appraise their sources critically. During the semester, Minor sets dates when students can turn in optional exercises for bonus points—and the exercises clearly fit in to the process of refining and working through aspects of the students’ topics. Students can do field work (observe a trial, schedule a police ride-along), report on web sites, review a movie, read a relevant book, or invent their own activity. Because the exercises are optional, Minor keeps the paper-load under control.
Some of Minor’s writing instruction comes in a handout that sums up important disciplinary conventions at the same time that it delineates the final project’s format. He calls his favorite tool “Fumblerules of Grammar”—a style sheet with a sense of humor, e.g., “Try to rarely, if ever, split infinitives”; “Passive voice is to be avoided”; “Eschew semantic obfuscation”; “Avoid clichés like the plague.”
By the time students start to draft their final project, they have a rich collection of their own work to assist the development of their topic.