The first students to participate in GW’s school-wide writing curriculum will graduate this semester, prompting a comprehensive evaluation of the program’s performance.
Three hundred papers were evaluated last summer to gauge the progress of the four-year-old UW program, which is nearing full implementation this year. GW launched UW in 2003 with the goal of ensuring that all students have a base level of writing knowledge. The program is divided into two parts, the University Writing class taken freshman year and two Writing in the Discipline classes that are usually taken during a student’s sophomore and junior years.
While the UW classes have been fully implemented for two years with all freshmen taking a comprehensive writing class called UW20, administrators are still phasing in the WID requirements.
The class of 2007 was the first class introduced to the program with one-third of students taking the UW20 class. Since this class was the inaugural class for the program, Biel said it will be evaluated extensively.
“We’ll be trying to collect papers from seniors this year, both who were a part of the writing program from the onset, and those who are not … and eventually do an assessment comparing those who were in the program and those who were not,” said Cheryl Beil, executive director of Academic Planning and Assessment. Beil is responsible for evaluating the UW program.
The program has reached its capacity in the number of courses being taught with 177 offered this year, 10 more than last year. UW’s each have a focus topic that all materials are related to such as musicals, comic books, conspiracy theories, food, feminism or anime. This is the second year that all incoming freshmen are required to take a UW20 class, and WID classes are expected to be fully implemented next year said Melinda Knight, executive director of the University Writing Program.
“It is well known that as people write it helps them compose their thoughts. It requires them to think logically in order to be able to be explanatory,” said Donald Lehman, executive vice president for Academic Affairs.
Administrators have been continually evaluating the success of the program using student feedback forms. These evaluations are paired with an advisory committee made up of 15 faculty members who look at writing samples produced from different classes.
“We’re getting student opinions through surveys, so the students self report on what they think they’re learning in the course … Then we’re also collecting papers from UW and WID courses,” Beil said. “Depending upon the results, we tell instructors how to improve student learning.”
Beil added that the many student self-reports show that students feel they are learning to think critically and write better. They also show that they rate their instructors very highly.
When the program began four years ago it was partially in response to a growing demand for skilled writers in today’s society, Knight said.
“The need for strong writing skills is greater now than it has ever been,” Knight said. “Even entry-level minimum wage positions require a degree of literacy that simply wasn’t the case 10 years ago. We want to ensure that all GW graduates have the writing skills they need to succeed.”
UW professor Emily Bliss said she thinks the program is having a positive impact on the University.
“(The program) is fabulous. It’s really one of the very best writing programs in the country and I am often just blown away by the commitment and excitement of my colleagues,” Bliss said. “I really whole-heartedly believe in it.”
Although political science WID professor Chad Rector believes his department has done a good job integrating WIDs into its program, he thinks students need to be better prepared before they reach the WID stage.
“It would probably be a good idea for the CCAS to provide resources to departments in order to help them teach relevant writing skills to students early on in their careers,” Rector wrote in an e-mail. “Ideally, we would be able to integrate WID-type programs into our introductory courses – that way students would develop writing skills appropriate to their major fields early enough to use them in upper-division classes.”
Freshman Jonathan Miller said he hated the UW class he had during his first semester of college, but said the idea of the program is a good one.
“The assignments we got were punctuation and grammar things, but we live in a society where technology can do that for us,” Miller said. “But I think the concept is great.”
