What is Four Years of Writing?Four Years of Writing is the University of New Hampshire's flagship longitudinal study of student writers. This study will follow a cohort of UNH undergraduates from the class of 2012 beginning with their senior year of high school, continuing through four years at UNH, and finishing up one year beyond graduation. Throughout these six years, the study will thoroughly document each student's experiences with writing and growth as writers. The study will give special attention to the role of the University Writing Requirement (UWR) and Writing Intensive (WI) courses in these students' development, but will also consider the many other environments in which UNH undergraduates write both inside and outside their classrooms. Using this information, we hope to learn much more about how UNH can help students develop as writers. The study will examine students' experiences primarily through case study interviews. Researchers will ask questions about students' background in writing, their perceptions of themselves as writers, their perceptions of their writing tasks, the factors that have impacted their writing identities, and the individual decisions they make while fulfilling course requirements at UNH. Additional elements of the case studies will include electronic portfolios of course papers and projects, surveys, self-reflective writing and other inquiry methods recommended by the Director of the UNH Writing Program and the University Writing Committee. Why do a longitudinal study?Previous studies of writing at UNH have provided statistical data on writing courses as well as student, faculty and administrative perceptions of the UWR and WI courses. However, we still need to know more about the extent to which these courses help students to grow as writers. We need to learn about the ways in which these courses and their teachers help students. And just as importantly, we need to determine how other factors—including non-WI courses and writing experiences outside of the classroom—influence the development of student writers at UNH over the long term. Faculty workshops and roundtables are already helping us learn more about the ways teachers plan and revise their curriculum to promote student learning. Four Years of Writing will complement these findings by providing a clearer picture from the students' point of view. Our results will help us to see the real impact of teaching methods. Many studies of writing suffer from a design flaw: they rely too heavily on impromptu writing tests, portfolio collections and holistic ratings that privilege text over context. These measurements are especially problematic as indicators of writing development at the entry and first-year levels because they assume that all students begin their undergraduate careers as relatively uniform "beginners," when in reality UNH students come from a wide variety of writing backgrounds. Beyond the first year, many tests operate on the assumption that all students progress through the same writing curricula at the same rate, but the flexibility of the UNH University Writing Requirement makes such an assumption impractical. Finally, many studies assess student writing in a "vacuum," without assessors' knowledge of the contexts surrounding it. These contexts, however, are what we're most interested in learning about. We don't merely want to know how well our students are doing; we want to know the reasons for their successes and failures, and we want to know how we can improve instruction at UNH. A broad interview-based study will give us the rich details we need. What are the benefits for UNH?Four Years of Writing will have an immediate impact on the "culture of writing" at UNH. We'll become more aware of how students interpret and respond to writing assignments. We'll learn more about the individual writing decisions students make within particular writing assignments. We'll notice patterns: teaching methods that seem to be especially successful, student approaches to assignments that often work well, courses and course combinations that appear to benefit students within particular situations, and so on. As a result, we'll become better at structuring and describing our courses and writing assignments, and we'll improve the ways we advise our students both inside and outside classroom environments. In addition, 4YW will provide a detailed record of student writing at UNH that can be utilized in many ways. It will document student successes as well as successful courses and assignments; these successes can be publicized for a variety of audiences at the university, local and national level and within academic journals. Results of the study will contribute to ongoing discussions and workshops on teaching writing at the university level. And because interviews and writing projects will be archived, the study will continue to answer questions that might not be asked during the initial analysis of the results. The study will not be structured to support any predetermined argument about the current state of UNH writing courses, requirements or teachers. Instead, it will attempt to paint a picture of what is currently in place. We consider it one of the major steps in the Writing Program's multifaceted assessment of writing at UNH, a baseline from which our most important future assessment questions will arise. Good writing programs constantly evolve, and this study will help us to articulate a vision for the future of writing at UNH. Where can I learn more?Read on! Click the links below: Four Years of Writing: High school. This page details the work of the high school interview team, which is now busy at work on the first year of the study.
Four Years of Writing: Undergraduate. This page describes our 2005-07 interview pilot studies as well as the UNH first-year student interviews that will begin in 2008-09.
Four Years of Writing: Alumni. On this page, you find out more about our alumni research conducted in spring 2007, as well as plans for our Class of 2012 post-grad study.
For more information on any aspect of Four Years of Writing, contact Mike Garcia, Assistant Director of the Writing Programs and coordinator of this study, at mike.garcia@unh.edu. |
