Overall Benefits

While colleges and universities have recognized the importance of writing throughout the curriculum, it has been difficult to understand how much and what kind of writing students are actually doing. The CSWC is designed to provide a snapshot the writing their undergraduates do. By participating in the consortium, schools can gather data about students' writing behaviors that would otherwise be impossible to acquire.

Colleges and universities are increasingly dedicating new programs and resources that focus on student writing. These changes are led in part by the recognition offaculty, the public, and the professional world that writing ability is an essential skill for all college graduates. In addition, the research of Derek Bok, Richard Light, David Russell, and Marilyn Sternglass, among others, suggests also that writing activities increase students’ engagement and learning in any course. This movement is also driven by new concerns about students’ readiness to enter a global workforce with multifaceted, complex demands for communicative effectiveness.

CSWC participants will receive a range of reports that idescribe students' responses to both the NSSE core survey and the additional question set about writing. Participants also receive the raw data, which they can use to answer their research questions about the role of writing at their institutions. For instance, institutions can examine the relationships between writing practices and the gains student report for a variety of other learnign outcomes.

Benefits for first-year-writing programs and WAC/WID programs

Paul/Chris For both first-year writing programs and WAC/WID programs, the CSWC question set asks questions that probably align with some or all of your program’s learning outcomes. Your NSSE results will provide an additional indirect measure of student learning, and could help you better understand what students are writing and how instructors are teaching writing, teaching disciplinary writing, or using writing to enhance learning.

Benefits for departments, colleges, and other programs and units

Individual departments and colleges can use the CSWC data to better understand the writing practices of their undergraduates. Individual departments, colleges, and other units can isolate the data for their students and examine their writing practices, and can even compare their students’ responses with students overall and from other units. If they request a special analysis from NSSE (which requires a fee), a unit could compare their students' responses wiht the responses of similar students from other institutions. For instance, a history department could compare their majors to the history majors from other institutions. Some units may choose to work with their offices of research/planning to analyze the data themselves

Benefits for the institution

Your institution’s office of research/planning is probably already aware that NSSE is a highly regarded and increasingly influential means for assessing student behavior and effective educational practice. If your institution is already administering the NSSE in Spring 2009, it can participate in the consortium for a very reasonable fee and gain an overall snapshot of students’ writing practice. These results, like all NSSE results, can be used for benchmarking: comparing an institution with other institutions or comparing your performance with pre-established goals.

Institutions may be especially interested in using the CSWC survey results as part of their overall accreditation and accountability efforts. One of the most widely used assessment products for measuring value-added learning is the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which is designed to measure students reasoning and communication skills by assessing students’ written responses. Institutions that use the CLA may be especially interested in knowing what kinds of writing their students are doing.