Council of Writing Program Administrators

This project aims to identify specific strengths and weaknesses of students “mainstreamed” from remedial writing courses to the standard first-year college composition course, and the pedagogy most appropriate for a one-credit supplementary course intended to meet their needs.

BACKGROUND Over the last several years, it became apparent that the distinction between two courses in our institution's first-year composition curriculum, English 095 and English 101, was a distinction without a difference. Students in English 095 are assigned to read three academic essays during the course of the term, as are students in English 101; like students in English 101, English 095 students are required to write complex and frequently-revised texts in response to the assigned readings. The work of students in both courses is evaluated by a portfolio committee at the conclusion of the term, but 095 students do not earn graduation credit for their work. The placement test—a multiple-choice grammar, usage, and reading test—used to determine which students were required to take English 095 does not measure the critical reading and writing skills valued by our curriculum, and instructors who taught both English 095 and 101 reported little or no difference in the writing of their students or in the instruction they offered. However, it was clear that English 095 often obstructed students’ academic progress by requiring them to take English 095 as an additional, non-credit course. Last semester, a “Mainstreaming Committee” designed a pilot study to test the feasibility of eliminating English 095. During the Fall term, we mainstreamed 82 volunteer “basic writers”—students whose scores on the placement test would ordinarily require English 095—into English 101 and English 105, a one-credit course called “Editing College Writing” that provides an additional site for work on the writing these students produced for English 101. While we are awaiting comparative data from this term, we are pleased to report that the mainstreamed students’ performance was at least equivalent to that of students placed directly into English 101 over the last two years. If next semester’s students enjoy similar success, we will have strong evidence supporting a credit-bearing alternative to a mandatory and often-counterproductive “remedial” writing course. However, in order to design an appropriate pedagogy for working with the students in English 105, we need to identify the specific strengths and weaknesses these students bring with them to their composition courses.

RESEARCH POTENTIAL Over the Fall semester, mainstreamed students completed three short-answer questionnaires about their reading and writing practices, a quantitative course assessment at the end of the term, and a portfolio of three essays for their 101 class. English 105 instructors also answered questionnaires about their experiences with the course. This substantial archive of documents provides the means for a nuanced textual analysis that could contribute to contemporary WPA research in alternatives to traditionally-structured curricula. Now that we have established that students classified as “basic writers” can pass English 101 with the assistance of English 105, we want to investigate both the weaknesses and the strengths of these students and identify the best pedagogy for effectively addressing them.

METHODOLOGY A team of reviewers--compensated for their time by grant monies--would be asked to identify patterns in the mainstreamed students' responses to the questionnaires distributed during the term. The reviewers would also read mainstreamed students' portfolios (with a corresponding number of randomly-selected English 101 portfolios serving as a control), noting strengths and weaknesses in both sets of portfolios. The Mainstreaming Committee would compare identified strengths and weaknesses in mainstreamed students’ essays with those same students' accounts of their concerns and experiences with reading and writing. The Committee would then cross-check the pedagogical conclusions to which this comparison would lead with the 105 instructors' responses to their experience teaching mainstreamed students, ultimately leading to guidelines for revisions to the 105 course. While this study has immediate implications for our 101/105 pedagogies, it will also contribute to what we believe are two under-explored issues in the literature on mainstreaming: first, a delineation of the specific "differences" that are often read as "deficiencies" when devising first-year composition curricula for "mainstreamed"students, and second, the specific pedagogies for the kinds of "adjunct" and "studio workshop"courses often recommended in mainstreaming projects. This information could help WPAs rethink not only traditional distinctions between “remedial” and standard first-year composition courses but also ways to address the needs of students assigned to either one.

TIMETABLE The Mainstreaming Committee will begin devising templates for reviewers before the completion of the Spring Term. During the summer of 2005, a team of five reviewers will meet several times to read and evaluate approximately 240 portfolios. (The Fall and Spring Pilots will generate about 120 portfolios; a corresponding number will be selected at random from concurrent sections of English 101.) The reviewers will finish their work by August 1st; a report will be drafted by September 15th. We anticipate no trouble in submitting a revised copy to the Chair of the Research Grants Committee by the deadline of June 15, 2006.

PROJECT CONTEXT While much groundwork in the reconsidering of the role of “basic writers” in our composition classes has been laid by writers for CCC and the Journal of Basic Writing (e.g., Peter Dow Adams, David Bartholomae, Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson, Judith Rodby and Tom Fox, Mary Soliday), we wish to follow the lead of Gregory Glau, who brought scholarship on his “Stretch Program” to the readership of WPA. As recent collections like Gerri McNenny and Fitzgerald’s Mainstreaming Basic Writers and Rose and Weiser’s The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist have shown, a reconsideration of “basic writers” necessarily involves a reconsideration of “mainstream” writers and the courses intended for them.

INVESTIGATOR EXPERTISE The director of this project has extensive research and teaching expertise in basic writing specifically and composition generally. Current Director of Composition and Professor of English at a large public research institution, s/he is author of two books on composition (NCTE 1999 and SUNY Press 2000) and numerous essays in CCC, College English, JAC, the Journal of Basic Writing, and elsewhere. S/he is the winner of the Richard Braddock Award and the W. Ross Winterowd Award for Most Outstanding Book in Composition Theory. The two principal co-investigators, the Assistant Director of Composition and the English 105 Course Coordinator at the same school, have significant experience teaching composition and have presented at regional and national conferences in rhetoric and composition, including CCCC.

PRESENTATION OF RESULTS In addition to preparing a poster-presentation at the WPA Breakfast at the 2006 CCCC, we would also plan to submit a detailed article to The WPA Journal, giving the full story of the implementation and follow-up on our 2004-2005 Pilot Study, complete findings from both semesters, and recommendations for portable curricular redesign based on our results.

BUDGET We have obtained a course release for one of our rhetoric and composition graduate students for the Spring and Summer terms of 2005. This means that much of the work of drafting the questions and templates for the reviewers, coordinating the reading sessions, compiling data, and drafting the Final Report can be done without further expense to the First-Year Composition Program. A $1000 grant from the Council of Writing Program Administrators would enable us to compensate a team of 5 graduate-student readers (5 readers @ $10/hour x 4 [5-hour sessions]) for reading and evaluating approximately 240 po