Margaret, we have been assessing student proficiency in writing as they enter
Huron University College, and just before they graduate. This assessment has
been administered for four years now, so that the graduates this past year also
wrote the assessment in their first year. The findings indicate that students
who come in with good writing skills generally go into the honours programmes
and those with poorer skills go into the general three year programmes. Those
in the general programme who graduate after four years tend to have better
skills than those who graduate after only three. While all three groups make
progress in their writing skills, no one group makes great progress. The three
year students, for example move from an average score of "2.6" on the essay to
"3" out of "5", and the honours students move from "3" to "3.2". The most
telling indicator is number of grammar errors. The three year students have an
average of 38 errors on the two writing assignments (essay and summary of an
assigned reading). They graduate with an average of 33 errors per paper. The
honours students have 22 errors per paper when they arrive at Huron, and
graduate with an average of 19 errors. Most of the paired t-tests showed that
there are significant differences on an individual basis, and that the
differences in performance increase with the number of years that students
remain in the college. What this tells us is that students in three year
general programmes don't make a lot of progress in writing through their time
at the college. Since we have no writing courses, and our writing centre only
offers about 20 hours per week of instruction hours, I would like to interpret
this as meaning that Writing Centres and Writing Courses may help these
students increase their skills. This increase in skills may encourage them to
stay on and do either a four year degree or an honours degree. I can send you
the whole report or just the conclusions, if you like.
Margaret Procter wrote:
> Colleagues:
>
> Can you help me find established benchmarks and other measures of best
> practice for writing centres and writing courses? I'm being asked to come
> up with these for the Arts and Science component in the new U of T planning
> and budget cycle. This recurrent exercise could be a good opportunity for
> the 14 or so writing centres here and the increasing number of writing
> courses to show administrators how important and successful we are. But in
> budget-cutting Ontario we also have to see it as one more challenge to
> defend our existence.
>
> I am aware of Jim Bell's methods for program evaluation (he outlines them
> in Inkshed 14.7, available at
> http://www.stthomasu.ca/inkshed/dec96.htm#subtitle3), which depend on
> intensive interviewing of students. Has anyone found other ways of
> gathering "hard" data -- maybe about retention rates? Are there other
> measures of student success related to writing-centre use that are both
> valid and vivid? We will certainly provide testimonials from students and
> fellow faculty, but hope we can also speak some of the administrative
> language of numbers.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Margaret.
>
> --
> (Dr.) Margaret Procter
> University of Toronto
> Coordinator, Writing Support
> 15 King's College Circle
> Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H7
>
> (416) 978-8109; FAX (416) 971-2027
> http://www.utoronto.ca/writing
>
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To leave the list, send a SIGNOFF CASLL command to
[log in to unmask] or, if you experience difficulties,
write to Russ Hunt at [log in to unmask]
For the list archives and information about the organization,
its newsletter, and the annual conference, go to
http://www.stu.ca/inkshed/
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