The Office of Institutional Assessment and Studies (IAS) is conducting an assessment of the writing programs in each of the University’s undergraduate schools in order to follow the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s (SCHEV) requirement for the University to evaluate the success of its students in “core competencies,” said Jonathan Schnyer, IAS Associate Director and University Assessment Coordinator.
How it works
The assessment, upon request by SCHEV, will examine not only the writing skills that students have when they graduate, Schnyer said, but also the “value added” in terms of what students learn during their four years at the University. According to SCHEV’s Web site, the council is responsible for making higher education public policy recommendations to the Governor and General Assembly.
The request to assess students “as a whole across the institution” is difficult, Schnyer added, because the University has 6 different schools in which undergraduates take classes. IAS responded to the challenge of conducting a University-wide assessment by focusing on the curriculum within each school in order to determine the success of their programs, Schnyer said.
Though an emphasis on writing skills exists throughout the University, Schnyer noted that some schools, such as the Commerce and Engineering Schools, focus on different skills within the writing process, whereas the Architecture and Nursing Schools have similar emphases to the College’s writing program.
“Basically, for the College, for example, we designed a rubric in close consultation with the writing instructors and the faculty [in the ENWR program],” Schnyer said. “We collect representative examples of the student work,” he said, noting that 7 learning outcomes, including the ability to draw sound, logical conclusions and the ability to support those conclusions with sound evidence, are the areas which are examined in order to assess student strengths and weaknesses.
He added, however, that the assessment also looks at groups of majors in order to see how students in related fields are performing.
“We started work on this last spring, got together a committee of faculty and started planning for this during the summer,” Schnyer said. At this point, the committee started collecting “pre-papers” which include sample papers that had been written by first-year College students at the beginning of an ENWR course.
Evaluations of pre-papers generally occurred in December and January, Schnyer said. Fourth-year papers will be evaluated by IAS and the faculty committees throughout the spring semester, and the overall results of the evaluations will be analyzed in May and June, Schnyer said.
Following this, Schnyer said, IAS plans to submit an initial report to SCHEV September 1, with a more detailed report to be sent to the University’s provost and the deans of each respective school about a month later.
The actual collection of the sample papers, like the rubrics themselves, depends on the school, Schnyer said.
The College’s first-year papers have been taken from a random sample of teaching assistants teaching ENWR courses. The papers themselves were the first ones done by students in the course, Schnyer said.
This is followed by a “pre-post” assessment done to evaluate how well students are learning the material from their first-year writing courses, Schnyer said.
The collection of fourth-year papers from the College, however, tends to be more of a struggle, Schnyer said. Unlike the first-year assessment process, fourth-year papers are collected through e-mails sent out by faculty members, said Richard Handler, an anthropology professor who was involved in sending some of the e-mail requests.
Schnyer noted that IAS tries to make this sample representative of the University student population, noting that they check to see which students responded to the request when deciding how to adjust for any overrepresentation or underrepresentation based on gender or ethnicity.
The sample papers themselves, however, are randomly assigned numbers and then randomly generated when the actual assessment is conducted, Schnyer said. Ultimately, the anonymity of students is preserved during the assessment, so the results are not intended to have an effect on students’ grades or records, Handler said.
Handler noted, however, that the most common assessments are those done by every faculty member when they evaluate their students’ work.
Outside the college
In addition, individual schools may conduct their own assessments in order to satisfy accreditation requirements, Handler said.
For example, the Department of Science, Technology and Society, which is responsible for developing the writing skills of Engineering students, prepares for accreditations that are done every 5 years, STS Department Chair Deborah Johnson said. The department performs an ongoing assessment that continuously influences how the department instructs students the next year, she said.
“The real challenge [when instructing students] is to... engage a student in sort of being able to think about and even critique their own writing,” Johnson said.
Johnson noted that companies that interview students, even in the field of engineering, clearly believe that communication skills such as writing and oral presentation are “absolutely essential” for employees to have.
This poses another challenge, however, since students often choose engineering because they excelled in math and science and may not have perceived writing as their area of strength, Johnson said.
Nonetheless, the key skills taught by STS, which instructs students throughout their 4 years at the University, center around teaching students how to articulate an argument, Johnson said. For example, she noted that students need to know what a claim is, need to give evidence to support the claim and need to organize the paper so that it clearly has an introduction, a body and a conclusion, all of which are built in “a nice sequence.”
Johnson added that there are other factors in determining the quality of a student’s writing. “Is it sharp? Is the argument developed?” Johnson said. “Does it show that they understand the audience that they’re writing to?”
One of the challenges in this, Johnson said, is for students to be able to write both papers for non-experts in the subject and papers for experts.
ENWR: progress and problems
These concerns were not limited to the Engineering School, said English Prof. Gregory Colomb, Chair of the Department of Academic, Professional and Creative Writing, which directs the ENWR program.
“There’s actually a predictable progression,” Colomb said. “When students come in [to the College], there are two things they tend not to know... one is that in the university and professional context, nobody wants to be told what they know... [and] the other thing... is how to make a good argument.”
By their fourth year, however, College students tend to be “socialized into an academic discourse,” making it a challenge to teach students how to write like experts without making the argument inaccessible to non-experts.
“Giving that there is this predictable movement of students... what we need and don’t have is a way to interact with students more than once through the course of their career here,” Colomb said. “...Our goal is to give writers some ways to analyze what they have produced... so that they can use conscious processes to help them to better those things we can only do passively.”
Though the majority of ENWR instruction occurs in the first year, Colomb said, the program remains distinctive in its teaching methodology. The program reflects the belief that most of the writing process takes place through unconscious processes rather than conscious choices, he said.
“I can certainly say that within the first year the quality of writing improves dramatically,” said Graduate Arts & Sciences student Ryan Cordell, who is also assistant director of the University’s Writing Center.
He noted that the first-year ENWR program is “able to help a wide variety of students with... different levels of writing ability to put down an argument with a clarity that [allows it to] be understood by not only me... but I think by an audience outside [the ENWR class.]”
While noting that the program is “truly state of the art,” with a very well trained group of teachers, Colomb said budget limitations prevent the program from expanding its scope.
“Before the budget cut we exempted about a third of the first-year class not on the fact that we didn’t think they [needed] a class” but because they could not afford to instruct that many students, Colomb said. He added that budget cuts will cause the number of students exempted from the first writing requirement to increase by about half the current number.
Despite the current issues stemming from the budget cuts and lack of a large-scale writing program beyond the first year, the ENWR program still has ideas for new tools that could be implemented once the needed resources were found, Colomb said.
In this respect, the IAS assessment will look not just at the bare minimums required by SCHEV but will look to make assessments that are useful to the schools, Schnyer said.
“It’s not a particular area of weakness for us, I don’t think,” Prof. Handler said. “We have very strong writing programs at U.Va., so it might have some effect on how people are teaching writing in different disciplines outside the English department.”
Colomb added that the state is concerned primarily with the issue of whether universities are doing their job. He said that he doesn’t expect it to examine whether or not he needs to change the content of his classes but rather to see if students are learning what the program is asking them to learn.
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