By Brian Graves and Jessica Pisano
Our motivating questions: How best to encourage and support writing beyond our first-year classes? Inspired in part by Mark Blaauw-Hara’s (2014) research on his campus, our research explores how UNCA faculty talk about writing with their students, what genres they assign, and what rhetorical features they expect.
I. Survey (52 responses, a 16% response rate)
II. Focus Group (6 people, all of whom completed the survey; one each from biology, environmental science, music, philosophy, mass communication, and anthropology)
What do most students struggle with?
- Reading / Following the prompt
- Developing, organizing, and supporting arguments
- Integrating & documenting sources (and avoiding plagiarism)
- Grammar (tense shifts, passive/active voice)
What do students do well?
- Communicate ideas
- Synthesize (sources & evidence)
- Work hard
- Ask questions
- Take feedback
- Navigate differences between disciplinary styles
What would the ideal FYW class include?
- Writing and rewriting
- Peer review
- Developing & supporting arguments
- Attention to audience
- Attention to grammar “basics”
- Awareness of different “types” of writing
- Reflection on feedback
- Time management
- Writing concisely
- Workshopping other students’ papers
- Low-stakes writing
- Paraphrasing & summarizing
III. Writing Prompt Collection and Coding:
42 prompts from 15 disciplines
Limitations:
- Unsure what additional instructions were given in class (we only had the prompt to go by—no context)
- Sample size—only 42 prompts
- We only what people gave us (perhaps these professors were especially interested in writing?)
Our takeaways:
- most prompts don’t explicitly state audience, purpose, or genre, but seem implicitly designed for instructor to assess what students know
- few prompt for higher-order tasks
- limited awareness of and/or attention to the ways writing shifts based on discipline, context, and genre
- focus group suggests that faculty don’t know what FYW course does, but the course does offer a lot of what they think it should
- disconnect between goals and criteria as stated in the survey and prompt goals
- we could better support student writing by helping students reflect on the choices they make when they write and fostering awareness of each writing situation