Profiling Writing in Majors

by Sue Durham, Nursing, WAC Assistant Director

To help Mason’s highly ranked (by U.S. News and World Report) Writing Across the Curriculum program continue to serve students and faculty in our rapidly growing university, the Provost recently allocated additional funding to support faculty in their efforts to teach effectively with writing.  To best provide this support, we needed to understand what types of writing are currently being assigned and what kinds of assistance faculty need, especially those teaching writing-intensive courses, to help them accomplish their goals for student writing in the course. In the fall, Terry Zawacki, WAC director, and I began conducting interviews with undergraduate coordinators, chairs, and associate chairs.  Our aim is to produce profiles of the writing students are doing in the various majors in the colleges, including formal writing as well as writing-to-learn, and the learning outcomes that motivate this writing.

We started the first round of interviews in the new College of Science (COS) with a questionnaire about the kinds of writing being assigned and also faculty’s concerns and questions about teaching with writing. We interviewed COS undergraduate coordinators from Astronomy,  Chemistry and Biochemistry, Environmental Science and Policy, Geography, Mathematical Sciences, Molecular and Microbiology, and Physics. We then identified some of the following themes:

Attitudes Toward Students’ Writing

• Most units take teaching writing very seriously.
  
• Faculty dissatisfaction with students’ entry-level writing skills seems universal, but most agree that student writing improves with feedback and multiple writing opportunities within classes.

Types of Writing

• More writing is taking place throughout each unit than we thought, but faculty do not always identify the informal writing that occurs as a valuable activity.
  
• Much science writing is iterative, so students receive feedback each time they submit an assignment. Feedback, then, is intended to shape the next submission rather than a revision of the same piece of writing.
  
• While the importance of writing in electronic formats and with new technologies was acknowledged, it is not typically a focal point of assignments in the writing-intensive courses for the COS majors.

Assessing Writing

• Faculty are concerned about hurried or sloppy student writing, but they vary in the degree to which they penalize poor writing.
  
• COS units recognize that they still need to go through writing assessment for their majors, which should provide valuable information about their students’ writing competence. In the smaller majors, the coordinators feel confident that they can evaluate their students’ competence as writers by looking at beginning- and end-of-course papers.

Resources Needed

• Large classes work against faculty members’ desire to include more writing in their courses even though they realize that writing is an effective way of engaging students in the material of the course.
  
• Teaching a writing-intensive course is rewarding but time intensive, a point that should be recognized and rewarded in the department.
  
• Many undergraduate coordinators agree that faculty could benefit from formal training on working with student writers, but they may not have the time to devote to attending workshops on teaching with writing, especially when this kind of additional effort may not be rewarded.
  
• Teaching assistants could benefit from additional training on teaching writing, especially if they are teaching lab courses. 
  
• Most units recommend that their students use the Writing Center, though there was some concern about whether tutors had the background to assist with highly techni writing, like that which is assigned in math and physics.

Our interviews thus far have given us valuable information about writing in COS,  only some of which I’ve detailed here. Our hope is that the writing profiles we develop from our interviews will illustrate the diverse array of writing opportunities students encounter in their major and also highlight the learning outcomes that motivate this writing.

We think that the profiles will be useful to faculty and departments for course and curriculum development and program review, and also will prove interesting to external audiences who will see the variety of writing experiences our students are being given in their majors. The profiles will eventually be available online on the WAC website.

Among its other activities, the WAC Committee also began collecting syllabi from writing-intensive courses, starting with COS, as part of its ongoing review of the writing-intensive requirement. Our focus will move next to the College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA), to create profiles and also to collect WI syllabi for assessment.

The WAC Committee would like to thank the chairs, associate chairs, undergraduate coordinators and the faculty of the College of Science for granting the interviews and giving their thoughtful responses.  Special thanks to Cynthia Beck, Rick Diecchio, Randy McBride, Chris Parsons, Jean Pilon, Lawrence Rockwood, Phil Rubin, John Schreifels, and Joe Weingartner.