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Assessment efforts are being conducted both on a unit and project-level:

Assesment of WEC Units' Writing Plans

  • With the support of the WEC team, participating units build assessment guidelines and measures into their Writing Plans. The purpose of these assessment activities is to track the progress, over time, of the units' implementation of their WEC-related goals.

  • Data gathered by the WEC team to support units' implementation include:

Assessment of the WEC Project

WEC pilot assessment research is conducted around two questions:
  1. How does the WEC process support the meaningful integration of writing instruction into disciplinary curricula?

    Data gathered about the WEC process include surveys of faculty, teaching staff, professional affiliates, and students; taped and transcribed meetings and summaries; and unit demographic data. The aim of this research is to track, describe, and report to our funders about the ways in which the process itself has allowed for faculty-driven curriculum change.

  2. How does the WEC process result in improved student writing?

    In addition to the aforementioned data collection, the assessment coordinator is conducting three in-depth case studies of contrasting WEC units in order to more finely describe and understand how the process works and to what extent it is an effective and viable way for the University to address the improvement of undergraduate student writing. We are also partnering with Institutional Research to work with University-wide student assessment data such as SERU and NSSE to further understand the relationship between better teaching of writing and student engagement, retention, and graduation rates.

Center for Writing   10 Nicholson Hall    216 Pillsbury Dr. SE, Minneapolis,   MN 55455    Phone: 612-625-0791   Fax: 612-626-7580