Writing at the State U: Instruction and Administration at 106 Comprehensive Universities
256
Writing at the State U: Instruction and Administration at 106 Comprehensive Universities
256eBook
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Overview
Writing at the State U presents a comprehensive, empirical examination of writing programs at 106 universities. Rather than using open survey calls and self-reporting, Emily Isaacs uses statistical analysis to show the extent to which established principles of writing instruction and administration have been implemented at state comprehensive universities, the ways in which writing at those institutions has differed from writing at other institutions over time, and how state institutions have responded to major scholarly debates concerning first-year composition and writing program administration.
Isaacs’s findings are surprising: state university writing programs give lip service to important principles of writing research, but many still emphasize grammar instruction and a skills-based approach, classes continue to be outsized, faculty development is optional, and orientation toward basic writing is generally remedial. As such, she considers where a closer match between writing research and writing instruction might help to expose and remedy these difficulties and identifies strategies and areas where faculty or writing program administrators are empowered to enact change.
Unique in its wide scope and methodology, Writing at the State U sheds much-needed light on the true state of the writing discipline at state universities and demonstrates the advantages of more frequent and rigorous quantitative studies of the field.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607326397 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TEACHING, ADMINISTERING, AND SUPPORTING WRITING AT THE STATE COMPREHENSIVE UNIVERSITY
WHY STATE COMPREHENSIVE UNIVERSITIES?
Writing at the State U: Instruction and Administration at 106 Comprehensive Universities presents a detailed, contextualized, and empirical analysis of the state of writing programming at four-year state comprehensive universities, a broad classification that includes research universities, MA-granting universities, and BA-granting colleges. The idea of this book began with an idea for another book: I wanted to write about the challenges but also possibilities for great writing instruction and support at US state comprehensive universities (SCUs), as this was a subject with which I was deeply, and personally, familiar. I believed I had figured out how to be an effective writing program administrator (WPA) at my school, Montclair State University in New Jersey, although it had taken close to a decade of hard work to create, organize, and support writing curricula, programming, and approaches to staffing and faculty development of which I could be proud. Along the journey I had often felt apart — and sometimes excluded — from the scholarly conversation on writing program administration, as it was so often set within the context of the research university or, less frequently, the small college. I received invaluable support from the WPA listserv and from conference conversations where WPAs from SCUs abound. But my long and often lonely journey to develop a strong and well-regarded writing program at an SCU made me want to reach out and provide support to writing faculty and WPAs in similar situations and also to graduate faculty at research universities whose preparation of these faculty is limited by their own research-university contexts. From my conversations with WPAs and writing faculty at SCUs, I know many wonder how they can shape a good program without what the doctoral programs they had graduated from had been equipped with: graduate students to teach the majority of the classes (and who could be required to take a graduate class in writing studies); a staff of directors, coordinators, and secretaries; and a cohort of writing studies colleagues to work with, among other assets. The book I thought I'd write was inspired by my wish to show what could be done. (In fact, a lot can be done, and many departures from what is possible at a research university actually amount to a superior writing experience for the undergraduates we are pledged to serve because comprehensive universities, like BA-granting institutions, are typically less beholden to research and doctoral-education imperatives that can deemphasize undergraduate education).
However, I soon realized that what I really knew was what I had done at Montclair State University. I had a great case study. But I didn't know much about what was happening in other writing programs at other SCUs that weren't specifically represented in the scholarship or run by personal friends. With experience working with my colleague Melinda Knight on a study that used publicly available information to study writing at 101 top universities, I believed publicly available information would allow me to sample and explore a large number of SCUs so as to draw a much fuller, albeit bird's-eye, portrait. With Melinda, I had found that much can be discovered about how an institution teaches and administers writing by combing carefully and systematically through publicly available information. With these goals and primary method established, I developed these research questions:
1. To what extent have established principles and practices of writing instruction and administration been implemented at state comprehensive universities?
2. In what ways is writing instruction at state comprehensive institutions, as a class, different from writing instruction at other classes of institutions, and from writing instruction at different historical time periods?
3. How are the major scholarly debates in FYC instruction and WP administration reflected — or not — at state comprehensive universities?
My strategy for investigating these questions was to collect existing data that would reasonably be available at all institutions in a large sample, from catalogs and other publicly available data, to get a robust, bird's-eye view. But first I had to select a sample, thus raising the question, what is a state comprehensive university?
STATE COMPREHENSIVE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES: HOW THEY FIT IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION LANDSCAPE
The category of SCUs, also called regional public universities, is fairly broad, including selective state institutions (e.g., James Madison University in Virginia), large research universities (e.g., Texas A&M, Northern Arizona University), and even very small institutions (e.g., University of Maine at Presque Isle and Mayville State in North Dakota). As an institutional class, the SCU is subject to less scholarly attention than is the flagship state university, yet according to the association that represents SCUs, the American Association for State Colleges and Universities, collectively, SCUs enroll 3.8 million students, occupying a kind of middle ground within the public-education landscape between the most elite research university and the small private college or the community college. Informally, the SCU is well known in higher education and to the public; there are approximately 420 such institutions nationwide (American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2010). Thus, greater understanding of writing programming at SCUs is valuable not only to the institutions that fall under this classification but also to higher education and writing researchers who wish to understand the state of college writing in the country today. Surprisingly, to date, in the robust and expanding body of scholarship devoted to writing program administration, no writing scholar has specifically attended to SCUs as a class, even though these institutions grant baccalaureate degrees to half the students enrolled in public US four-year colleges and universities and 28 percent of all students attending private or public four-year colleges or universities (American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2014, 11).
STUDY DESIGN
Institutional class selected, I designed my methods for investigation. Following Richard Haswell's (2005) call for empirically based scholarship and bolstered by Dan Melzer's (2009, 2014) work analyzing writing assignments through an Internet-based search process, among others, I sought a method that would enable me to speak broadly about national trends. Although researchers in writing studies have historically developed samples by sending out invitations to participate in a survey, for this study I chose to select a representative sample and gather most of my data independent of these participants. In choosing a master list of institutions to sample from, I selected the membership list of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), as I wanted a list that would provide a cross-section of colleges and universities that represent a broad and diverse range of public four-year institutions. AASCU schools range from student enrollments of 845 to 58,000, with an average enrollment of 10,430; collectively, they are responsible for educating 51 percent of all minority students and 48 percent of students who enroll in public four-year institutions (American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2014, 9–11), facilitating my goals of discovering what is happening in the vast middle of public, four-year higher education. The 106-institution sample was pulled from the AASCU list randomly after stratification by region and size. (I aimed for a sample of about 100 and ended up with 106, as this was the number that allowed for statistical representation of the sample in respect to region and size). Building on previous researchers' methodologies (Burhans 1983; Sideris 2004), during the fall of 2011, I collected all catalogs or bulletins and searched institutional websites to find documents that provided answers to the variable list I had identified, drawing on the methodologies developed with Melinda Knight for the "top university study." Thus, for each institution I have a host of assessment reports, captured websites, and schedule snapshots along with official catalogs or bulletins. Data were located in similar places: catalogs first and foremost but also Institutional Research reports, department and program websites, assessment units' publications, and registrar documents and reports. This primary data set was then amplified by a survey distributed to identified and confirmed leaders at each of the schools; this method provided some additional data and allowed for triangulation through cross-checking.
Preliminary data gathered, to develop specific questions and a first draft of categories to use for sorting data pertaining to these questions, I drew on previous state-of-the-field studies, of which there are many, beginning with Warner Taylor in 1929 (see table 2.1 for a comprehensive list of studies). For some areas of inquiry, scholarship within the field prompted me to develop additional categories (e.g., prominent discussion of the writing-about-writing movement led me to include this category). These initial drafts of variables and associated categories (or values), developed prior to data collection, were expanded and revised significantly as I collected and reviewed the data (e.g., I added categories in placement methods, such as the international baccalaureate, as the data taught me about possibilities that previous researchers hadn't discussed.) Thus, like many other writing studies researchers (e.g., Barton and Donahue 2009; Brandt 2014; Dadas 2013; Gladstein and Regaignon 2012; Purcell-Gates, Perry, and Briseno 2011), I was guided by a grounded-theory approach (Birks and Mills 2015; Glaser and Strauss 1967). Through a process of moving back and forth from research on other data sets to reviewing data I had collected, I created a list of 148 variables to guide my further data collection. The variable list is too lengthy for inclusion here, so it can be found in appendix D. I have arranged the variable list with notations that explain my sources for each variable, notations about my sources, and notations about how conflicts were resolved when conflicts existed between two sources (e.g., between the catalog and the survey response).
In the presentation of my study discoveries, I compare my findings to those presented by previous researchers (e.g., Burhans 1983; Gere 2009; Kitzhaber 1962, 1963; Larson 1994; Moghtader, Cotch, and Hague 2001; Smith 1974; Taylor 1929; Wilcox 1968, 1969, 1972, 1973; Witte, Cherry, and Meyer 1982; Witte et al. 1981; Witte, Meyer, and Miller 1982). In my selection of data, I have sought out a range of evidentiary points that help build multifaceted, measurable constructs for understanding FYC instruction in the sample, similar to the construct-representation work undergone to develop The Frameworks for Success in Postsecondary Writing Instruction (O'Neill et al. 2012), which constructs writing success as gained from the development of necessary "habits of mind" and also from experiences with a variety of "writing, reading, and critical analysis experiences" (O'Neill et al. 2012).
Variable types include the following range: Quantitative variables — for example, how many courses in FYC are required?
Categorical-descriptive — for example, what is the title of the WPA's position?
Categorical-dichotomous — for example, is there a WAC requirement? (yes or no)
Categorical-nominal variables — for example, what instruments or methods are used for placement decisions?
Categorical-ordinal variables (variables that can be ranked) — for example, what level of autonomy do faculty have in designing syllabi?
Data collected, I worked systematically, alone or with a research assistant, to code the data. Many of the data were quantitative or of a categorical nature that required little interpretation. However, where interpretation was required, I worked with a research assistant, blind double coding and then discussing the cases we disagreed on. More details about the data collection and coding methods are provided in the appendices (see apps. A and C), though I'll make two other points. First, my effort in data gathering was to lean toward the simplest, most reliable data points by asking questions for which the responses were indisputable — numeric or categorical. Second, I ventured into interpretative areas with care and some ground rules: when I made judgments regarding the emphases of courses and programs as determined by reading course descriptions and outcomes-related documents, I coded this data with a second coder with coding sheets that were pretested for high interrater reliability.
Data coded, I conducted my analysis through both quantitative and qualitative means. The quantitative analyses begin with reporting frequencies but also with identifying and reporting associations among variables, allowing readers to see when conditions converge. Thus, through the help of basic descriptive and inferential statistics, I was able to conduct association, correlation, and cross-tabulation analyses to provide indicators of the variables that typically were present when practices were consonant with those advocated for in the literature and by our national organizations, and to show when they were not. For example, the presence of a tenure-track WPA is positively associated with smaller class size, an emphasis on rhetorical instruction, and professional training of writing teachers. Along with presenting correlations and associations within the data and against data pulled from the Carnegie Classification database (Carnegie Foundation 2011), in my analysis I compare my findings to relevant studies on the state of the field, along with findings from a 2010 study (data-collection date) I conducted (Isaacs and Knight 2012, 2014). In this study, which I will refer to as the top university study, Knight and I collected data on 101 four-year colleges and universities, across institutional type, based on a selection derived from the annual rankings published by US News and World Report.
THE VALUE AND LIMITATIONS OF THE BIRD'SEYE VIEW
In the last decade, the discipline has embraced empirical methodologies, both close, careful studies by researchers such as writing center scholars Isabelle Thompson and Jo Mackiewicz (Mackiewicz and Thompson 2013, 2014; Thompson 2006, 2009; Thompson and Mackiewicz 2013; Thompson et al. 2009) and what I call a bird's-eye view by WAC researchers like Thaiss and Porter (2010) and Melzer (2014) and by the team of researchers working on the ongoing WPA/WCD (writing center director) study (Fralix et al. 2015). Bird's-eye studies in our field typically use surveys and self-reporting as their primary means for data collection. Mass survey was quite possibly the best option for many years, and there has been so much published research based on voluntary survey that the method is seldom questioned. Yet, this method relies on information provided by interested, willing parties. Does the investment of these individuals matter? Does this investment skew the results? These are the questions I asked when I designed this study. SCUs tend to include many colleges and universities that will not be represented on these surveys because they do not have WPAs or other faculty and staff who participate on the WPA and similar listservs and who are willing to answer the many surveys distributed through these listservs. I think any real understanding of the impact of our field requires that we gather and report on what is happening at institutions that are not part of our community as defined by membership in one of our field's organizations. Thus, to avoid the problem of the self-selection skew, essential to my study were two decisions: to random sample and to gather data through publicly available information.
Thus this study is most similar to those conducted by Witte and colleagues, and also by Ron Smith, studies at least twenty years old (Larson 1994; Smith 1974; Witte et al. 1981; Witte, Cherry, and Meyer 1982; Witte, Meyer, and Miller 1982). I was interested to see any evidence of recent changes to the higher education landscape, such as the increase in reliance on contingent faculty; the rise in assessment and accountability; the development of extensive university and college websites; and the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that requires colleges and universities to publicly (via the Internet) report course schedules, transfer policies, and other relevant information (Tromble 2008). We are more public with our practices and processes, as the interest in accountability has risen with concerns over debt and graduation rates, giving rise to increased federal investigation and oversight and requirements for increasingly public reporting by colleges and universities (White, Elliot, and Peckham 2015, 12).
(Continues…)
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