This is a conference proposal we’ve submitted. In 500 words, it describes what we’re up to. Of course, other questions and sub-projects can be spun off of this NSSE/WPA Council  collaboration

 

The So-Called “Best Practices” for Teaching Writing in the Disciplines:
Do They Make a Difference for Engagement and Learning?

 

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has partnered with the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) to address fundamental questions about the way writing can advance student learning and engagement. In spring 2008, NSSE administered a set of 25 supplemental questions about writing practices to over 23,000 students attending a representative sample of 82 baccalaureate-granting institutions, thereby providing the broadest snapshot so far of the writing undergraduates do.

 

Increasingly, universities are transforming their institution-wide curricula by dedicating new programs and resources to helping faculty in all disciplines infuse writing into their courses. This curricular movement has been inspired by the age-old adage that “writing is thinking” and by the research of Derek Bok, Richard Light, David Russell, and Marilyn Sternglass, among others, which suggests that writing activities increase students’ engagement and learning in any course. The movement is also driven by new concerns about students’ readiness to enter a global workforce with multifaceted, complex demands for communicative effectiveness. 

 

Although there is widespread agreement about the intellectual, pedagogical, and career-related value of students writing in all courses, there is little research to help administrators, curriculum committees, and writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) specialists understand which practices provide the greatest return on faculty and institutional investment. Most WAC specialists advocate the “process approach” in which students and teachers break the writing process into subtasks (e.g., developing ideas, organizing, drafting, revising). However, faculty and institutions may ask whether this time-intensive process is really effective for students in all courses, departments, and years in college? Similarly, we should examine whether other WAC strategies are the best ones to use in courses where writing is emphasized but not the central focus.

 

To answer these questions, NSSE and WPA developed a 27-item supplement to the standard NSSE instrument. The new items asked students how often they and their instructors engaged in practices identified by WPA members as “best” for teaching writing and for writing in the disciplines. In addition, some of the questions can be grouped into two statistically reliable scales that represent “best practices” for faculty and students.  

 

Our initial analysis of these very new data indicates that faculty’s greater use of best practices correlates with greater self-reported gains not only in knowledge and skills related to students’ future careers but also in such crucial areas as critical thinking and the ability to understand people who are different from themselves. In the coming months, we examine the relationship between best practices in writing-in-the-disciplines and the gains student report for a variety of other learning outcomes. We will also compare results from various demographic groups distinguished by major, class standing, sex, race/ethnicity and other characteristics. An earlier NSSE study (Kuh et al., 2007) found that educationally purposeful activities benefited Hispanic students’ GPAs and African American students’ retention to the second year more than it did for White students. Similarly, we will examine whether writing activities are especially beneficial for historically underserved students in terms of self-reported gains in personal and social development, career-related competence, and general intellectual skills.