In November, “Assessing Writing” – a top-tier international academic journal – published a special issue on the rich possibilities that emerge when students are given a meaningful writing prompt. The issue features the work of WSU graduate students Dorothy Worden, Jerry Petersen, Jared Judd Anthony and Donna Evans, all of whom began their research projects in a 2007 seminar with WSU writing professor Bill Condon.
“For a tier-one international journal to focus an entire issue on work done by WSU grad students is unprecedented,” said Condon, who is a guest editor for the issue and a consulting editor for the journal.
The journal has an acceptance rate of about 18 percent, he said, and all the essays went through its standard blind peer review process – meaning he couldn’t have influenced the outcome if he had wanted to. But, he said, once it became clear that articles by four of his former students had been accepted for publication, the editor, Liz Hamp-Lyons, decided that they merited a special issue.
The bane of students everywhere, timed-writing prompts typically elicit stale, throwaway essays useful for assessing writing competency but little else, Condon said. (Read the passage below, and then, in a well-developed essay, discuss …)
But he and his graduate students argue that colleges and universities can and should use the timed-writing prompt to ask students about their own educational experiences and then mine that data for the wealth of information it will provide.
As evidence, they cite information contained in more than 900 blue books written by WSU students as part of their Junior Writing Portfolio in 2006. For their timed-writing assessment, students were asked to reflect on their most significant courses.
Then they were asked to discuss how those courses or other experiences helped them in their pursuit of the Six Goals of the Baccalaureate, a set of goals that had been approved by the WSU Faculty Senate in 2005. Students were randomly assigned two goals to address, but otherwise the prompts were very much student-centered.
Condon, who developed the prompts while he was serving as director of WSU Writing Programs, said he believed they would elicit useful information. But until he and his grad students really delved into the essays, he had no idea how valuable the information would be.
Reading those essays changed my mind a lot about what a typical WSU student does and is,” he said. “They showed me, collectively, a side of WSU students that I think more people should see.
Far from being throwaway essays, the blue books revealed that students are engaged in their learning and committed to making a difference in the world. As in any good writing, the students gave specific examples of classes that were useful and teachers who were transformative.
By paying attention to what they wrote about, and what they didn’t write about, researchers could make inferences about which learning goals were being attained and which weren’t. (Qualitative and symbolic reasoning appears to be most in need of shoring up, Condon said.)
“This is a much better style of prompt,” Condon said. “Asking students to write about experiences they’ve had that are important to them is a better way to test.”
Suddenly, Condon said, content matters, not only for the undergraduates completing the timed-writing assessment, but for the graduate students who analyzed them. Just as the prompt became an authentic test of a student’s ability to express his or her ideas about something important, those essays provided data for Condon’s graduate students to conduct meaningful research.
Condon said each student came up with a research idea and then the group decided how to code for the relevant data, with each student coding 100 blue books for a total database of 900 blue books. Of the papers accepted for publication, two focused on the test-taking experience, one focused on technology-based learning experiences, and one focused on students’ sense of place as it relates to learning.
Evans, who wrote about place, said it was a massive project. She spent at least 40 hours coding the 100 blue books she was assigned and another 30 hours helping to set up a database.
But, she said, “We also realized by the end of the semester that we’d done valuable work.”
And the work didn’t stop there. Condon offered the students a one-credit course the following semester so they could continue working on their projects and getting them ready to present as conference papers and to submit for publication. Seven of the nine students took him up on it.
“I think there is just a whole wealth of information in those blue-book essays that doesn’t really get tapped into too often,” said Worden, who wrote about prewriting and revision in timed-essay responses.
Condon agreed, saying the blue books could be useful to WSU faculty and staff focused on any number of issues, from retention to general education to student engagement. While WSU Writing Programs doesn’t have the staff to do a formal analysis, Condon said he would like to see more graduate students develop research projects based on student writing.
Petersen, who has evaluated timed-writing assessments for WSU Writing Programs in past years, said with a generative prompt like the one about the learning goals, student writing truly can support important research.
Usually, he said, timed-writing assessments can generate research topics related to essay length, sentence structure, parts of speech or some other issue of mechanics. But with a student-centered prompt focused on learning experiences, they can generate data for a broad range of topics.
“It was a long haul from project design to getting the results published,” said Jared Judd Anthony, who graduated with his doctoral degree and is director of composition at Spokane Falls Community College. “I learned a lot about doing mixed-method research and about the publication process. It was a great capstone to my graduate education.”
