Council of Writing Program Administrators

Lisa Lebduska, Director of College Writing Wheaton College

Project Overview I am requesting $1000 in funding to complete the second half of a modest longitudinal study of undergraduate writing that seeks to understand how undergraduates’ evaluation of their own writing and of writing in general changes over time. I wish to compare reflections that seniors make about their freshmen writing to the reflections that they made about the same writing when they were sophomores. The study will also investigate the extent to which student GPA, major, final grade in First-Year Writing (FYW), and final grade in First-Year Seminar (FYS) correlate to the types of evaluations students make about their own writing. Internal funding allowed me to complete the first half of this study, which involved collecting the freshman papers and gathering reflections about these papers when their authors were sophomores. With WPA funding, I will be able to support the second half of the study as I collect information from the students who will be seniors in Fall 2005. Methodology. The methodology I will employ in this study will be similar to the methodology I employed in 2002 when I began the study.

In December 2002, I collected approximately 1000 papers that had been written in 17 out of 25 sections of our college’s First Year Seminar, which is taught by members of almost every department on campus and focuses on themes ranging from “Visions of Paris” (taught by a French faculty member) to “Next Stop Mars” (taught by a Physics faculty member). A year later, when the students were sophomores, I put out a call to a randomized sample of them requesting their participation in a study about their writing; after receiving a very low response rate, I contacted all of the students, finally gathering a group of thirty participants.

To elicit reflections about the writing the students had completed in their FYS seminars, I adapted the methodology employed by Kathleen Blake Yancey and Meg Morgan in their 1994 study of University of North Caroline exemption portfolios. After returning all of the collected FYS papers to the students who had written them, I asked students to answer the same questions used in the Yancey/Morgan study: 1.) Which of the papers in this collection is your strongest and why? 2.) Which of the papers is your weakest and why? and. 3.) If you were able to rewrite the weakest paper, what changes would you make to the paper and why?

After reading these reflective essays, I have categorized the student responses to see to what extent their responses fall into the same categories as those used in the Yancey/Morgan study: 1.)a-rhetorical textual features; 2.) references to the immediate rhetorical context, and 3.) references to conditions other than the immediate rhetorical context.

For the second half of this study, I will contact the seniors, ask them to revisit their freshman papers again, and will repeat the evaluative questions, again categorizing responses for the above features. I will then compare the responses to determine how and to what extent, if any, did the students’ evaluations of their writing change over time. I will also include an additional question asking them to assess what changes they have noted in their own writing processes and products during their undergraduate careers.

I’ll request that the College’s information retrieval specialist provide me with the data about participants’ majors, and GPA’s in FYS, FYW and overall. After obtaining this data, I’ll consult with a quantitative analyst for assistance analyzing the statistical significance between the logistical data and the qualitative responses. For example, is there a correlation between GPA and reflective responses that tend to emphasize a-rhetorical textual features? Does choice of major correlate with a particular set of responses? Does their understanding of their writing performance correlate to their grades in FYS, FYW or their GPA in any way?

Timetable. Sept. 2005-Jan. 2006. Contact the seniors and collect and read their reflective responses. Jan. 2006-March 2006. Request and analyze data. March-May 2006. Complete final draft of findings.

Relation to Previous Published Research and Scholarship. While the Yancey/Morgan study provided useful information about students’ reflections in high-stakes contexts, and Peggy O’Neill has identified strategies for helping “resisting [the] ritualistic discourse” of reflection, my study should contribute insights into how students reflect in relatively low-stakes contexts. Additionally, because my study will be longitudinal, I wish to see to what extent it affirms and/or complicates the Harvard longitudinal study conducted by Sommers and Saltz. Will there be a correlation between students who saw themselves as novices and those who achieved the greatest success at college writing?

I further imagine that the results of this study will contribute to researchers’ understanding about the teaching of writing in first-year seminars and I hope that it will raise questions about the existing and potential relationships between first-year seminar and first-year writing.

Proposer’s Expertise in this Area. A WPA for the last three years and a writing center director for 6 years prior to that, I have published articles in the anthology Student-Assisted Teaching and Learning, Chemical Engineering Education and Kairos and currently serve as a reader for Writing Center Journal. I will present the results of the first part of this study at 4C’s 2005.

Dissemination of Results. I will submit a proposal to 4C’s 2006, and I will submit my results to WPA journal and Research in the Teaching of English.

Budget

Personnel Information Retrieval Specialist 4 hours@$25/hour $100.00 Quantitative Analyst 2 hours@$50/hour $100.00 Student Assistant 50 hours@$10/hour $500.00

Materials Books $300.00

Total Request $1000.00