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eBook details

• Title: Writing Consultations can Effect Quantifiable Change: One Institution's Assessment
• Author : Writing Lab Newsletter
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 67 KB

Description

As Indiana Wesleyan University began preparing for its ten-year accreditation visit, I met with the Director of Assessment to discuss the types of data we were keeping on the Writing Center. I proudly showed her the extensive Excel file of data reflecting our Writing Center's growth since its inception in 1996. She replied that my data were fine, but if I wanted to "prove" that the Writing Center helped students become better writers, I needed to create a "quantifiable study that statistically measures the improvements in students' writing, perhaps comparing clients' and non-clients' first and last drafts." Of course, that's what every writing center director hopes for, but we all know how difficult it is to "count beans" in the writing center and "make the beans count" (Lerner, "Counting Beans"). In his article, "The Relationship between Writing Centers and Improvement in Writing Ability: An Assessment of the Literature," Casey Jones laments that, "Missing from this roster [of writing center assessments] is the type of 'formal' research common to physical and social sciences, and most notably absent are evaluation studies utilizing quantitative methodologies" (6). He includes in his assessment James Bennett's attempt to measure the influence of writing center visits on student essays by comparing pre/post essay scores (the very thing our Director of Assessment recommended we do) with "inconclusive results" (9-10). Jones goes on to claim that he has "not unearthed a single 'hard' empirical study of writing center instructional efficacy published since the late 1980's" (10). Jones concludes that the difficulties of conducting empirical research in composition studies has led researchers to center their studies around anecdotal evidence and qualitative reflections on student writing practices, studies that are, in Neal Lerner's words, "naturalistic" and provide "rich and nuanced" perspectives on our fields ("Writing Center Assessment" 58). Consequently, I was hesitant to consider, let alone attempt, an empirical study.

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