Undergraduate Writing Research Articles

Composing Math: An Interdisciplinary Faculty Partnership to Improve Undergraduate Writing in a Research-Focused Capstone Course

This article describes the outcomes of a faculty partnership between a math professor and a composition professor to improve the final paper in a research-focused senior capstone math course. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the importance of undergraduate research experiences and how to best create and support such endeavors. However, little space has been dedicated to helping math faculty design and scaffold writing assignments to support their students' development as scholars. We describe how our partnership took place, the changes we made to existing assignments and the creation of new ones, and an assessment of our efforts completed by an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students, which showed marked improvement in the areas of information literacy, critical thinking, and quality of writing.

Enhancing Undergraduate Writing Proficiency: An Examination of Alternative Feedback Methods and Student Perceptions

Enhancing Undergraduate Writing Proficiency: An Examination of Alternative Feedback Methods and Student Perceptions

Undergraduate Writing Fellow Conceptions of Writing-to-Learn and Quality of Writing

Undergraduate Writing Fellow Conceptions of Writing-to-Learn and Quality of Writing

Perceptions about Learner’s Achievement in English Major Undergraduate Online Writing Classes

Perceptions about Learner’s Achievement in English Major Undergraduate Online Writing Classes

Livestream

Livestream Matthew Tuckner (bio) Yellowstone National Park I watch schools of salmon lend themselves with pleasure to the mouths of grizzly bears when everything that's supposed to sit circled quietly around me starts shouting, the fat brick of hash I told my friend not to let me keep, not even if I kowtow at the knees for it, the pair of garish rotisserie chickens peppered with rosemary gossiping in the fridge, the little stipples of spinach I bestow gorgeous honorifics upon before they're sluiced from my teeth & swept down the drain. It's when the video teems, buffers, & leaps forward in time, losing time as it moves, that I misplace the bear I had come to love for the way she carries what remains of the fish after they've been fleeced of meat notched in her auburn fur like gaudy opals. Falling for [End Page 19] how she lumbered & caterwauled, lifting her snout to goad whatever wind the river carried with it, I felt myself, much like the thin-beaked heron entering the water without breaking the water, shocked at how easily I can sneak through this life. The dolly cants the camera & the camera cants my eye past the blotch of vetch blurred on the shoreline, yards beyond the center of the lens, just another perennial I'd find listing & losing its color in my mother's garden. Foraging for my bear by the strings of bone that bangle the thick muscles of her wrists, I wonder what the lens would find if it spun around & racked its focus: the way I bump my snout up against a big green button when it's feeding time, how I lick my coat until it sparkles & I can finally purr myself to sleep. When I was kept in a cage because I couldn't gather language to cradle the reasons I wanted to leap into the mouth of a beast that would catch & destroy me, my mother sent missives repeating be good & don't die, among other dreadful spondees. [End Page 20] When the lock was unlatched, & a clear, blue sky pinned my pupils, I should've been better, I will get better, I still say, a sentence I scan for its stresses, finding nothing but my plain as bone sadness. It would be wise to ape the species of duck I don't know the name of, that floats past the bears it confuses for hills, hopscotches between slipstreams of blood, ducks its bill below the surface, & slides down the long arc of a waterfall. I push my face flush against the screen to glimpse the better place it's tumbled to when a window pops up & tells me I can have twenty more minutes, but only if I pay for it. [End Page 21] Matthew Tuckner Matthew Tuckner is a writer from New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU where he is Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review and teaches in the Undergraduate Writing Program. He is the recipient of a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the inaugural Prufer Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Bat City Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch, among others. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Assigning Authenticity: Future Directions for Undergraduate Writing in Sociology

Social movements seeking to dismantle white supremacy within academia cast long-running debates over writing instruction in a new light. This conversation approaches these critiques as an opportunity for pedagogical reinvention. I put forward new theory that centers the social performance and psychological rewards of authenticity. I first review two essential literatures on writing instruction in sociology: (1) writing in the disciplines and (2) cultural rhetorics. This twinned review focuses on the values that inform curriculum design and how these biases and ideals shape instructors’ perceptions of student writing. I then apply research on authenticity to reflect on the self-formative challenges today’s undergraduates encounter and how these obstacles shape their relationship to learning. I argue that centering authenticity in writing instruction can help the discipline achieve its inclusive ideals because it enhances students’ sense of belonging in the discipline.

Two Models to Improve Undergraduate Writing Perception and Capabilities in Plant and Soil Sciences

Integration of professional writing with peer and instructor feedback as a graded component can be a strategy for writing improvement in an applied science undergraduate curriculum. The objective of this study was to assess the benefit of professional writing in first and second-year undergraduate courses in Agronomy and Horticulture with two different models for the writing experience. In the first-year course, students communicated the results of two plant growth experiments in the format of a standard research article. In the second-year course, students wrote a group report as a review of published research or a research-based proposal to address a soil management issue. Students were surveyed to determine their major and learning style evaluated with an18-question assessment. Students also chose their level of agreement with seven statements about the process and importance of professional scientific writing at the beginning and then at the end of the semester. Survey results showed that confidence in using and creating professional writing increased among students for both courses. Students in the first-year course showed a greater understanding of the value of peer reviewed research.

Wise Woman

Wise Woman Camille Guthrie (bio) Wise woman of Vermont, come out of the forestAssure me I won't die lonely in these woods, show meHow to keep owls out of my hair, tell me howTo stack wood, to shoot trespassers, to seal the cracksIn my heart to keep the ice out, promise meA catamount won't think I'm foodMake me a pot of venison stewWhile you describe what to expect during the ChangesWhen you no longer sleep and my sorrow seems girlishTeach me how to trim my whiskers when I get witchyAdvise me which mushrooms won't kill us quicklySuggest stapling my son to the wall till he's twenty-sevenTell me of your childless aunt who died asking for her kidsHow do I make it in this cold hard land?Tell me where the treasure's buriedWhat's the song I have to sing to myself? [End Page 10] Camille Guthrie Camille Guthrie is the author of four books of poetry: Diamonds (BOA Editions, fall 2021); Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois (2013), In Captivity (2006), and The Master Thief (2000)—published by Subpress. Her poems have appeared in such journals as At Length, Boston Review, Interim, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Poem-A-Day, Tin House, as well as in several anthologies including The Best of American Poetry 2019 & 2020 (Scribner). The Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College, she lives in rural Vermont with her two children. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Strategies for Teaching Undergraduate Writing Intensive Courses

Writing-intensive courses have become part of parks and recreation undergraduate curriculum across the United States. Writing is an important skill for future parks and recreation professionals as it is an essential skill needed to develop programs and staff training, marketing and fundraising campaigns, and to conduct and disseminate research effectively. This learning activity article provides an overview of writing-intensive assignments and activities used in a Public Relations course. The purpose of these activities is to enhance students’ critical thinking skills, strategies to expand students’ opportunities, and explore the use of rubrics as an efficient teaching and learning tool for both students and instructors. While the activities described in this article a specific to this course, they can be adapted to fit a variety of other courses in parks and recreation undergraduate curriculum.

Using Texts Which Address Local Issues to Create a Discursive Space within an Undergraduate Writing Course

ABSTRACT This study explores whether collaboratively writing about local issues would enable learners to deepen their understanding of their relationship with their own social context. A discursive space within an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course at an institution of higher education in Qatar was created. This was accomplished by replacing the readings within a mainstream EAP textbook with texts which explored local issues. This provided an opportunity for female undergraduate students (N = 30) to write term papers about some of the discourses which permeated their lives. Data were collected using open-ended questionnaires as well as examining participants’ term papers. Writing the term papers enabled some participants to become more aware of ongoing societal change and reflect on how they are located within this process. Elements of critical pedagogy were brought into a mainstream EAP course whilst at the same time respecting Qatar’s traditions and culture.

From an Archive to a Digital Map Edition: Introducing the Spatial Turn to an Undergraduate Writing Course

This article describes the process and outcomes of working with an undergraduate writing course as they created original scholarship for a digital map edition. Traditionally, library interventions in writing courses are limited to introducing students to library resources, developing better search terms, and research strategies. More recently librarians have incorporated primary source materials from special collections and archives into some classes as a way to engage student research. We worked with a faculty writing partner to introduce students to an archive but framed the experience through the lens of spatial thinking. As part of their research process students were required to conduct a spatial ethnography and their final essay was shared via a digital map edition. One of the results of this work is that the student essays offered a new way to discover a mural archive, providing a framework for how it can be used as a data and a research collection. We discuss how we worked with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and other guidelines to develop our assignments and an active learning environment, the process of balancing GIS/data literacy with primary source instruction, and our experience as embedded librarians throughout this process.

An Exploration of Writing Self-Efficacy and Writing Self-Regulatory Behaviours in Undergraduate Writing

Students will take independent action to improve their writing when they believe those actions will have a positive effect. The data presented focuses on the self-regulatory writing behaviours of nursing students in their third year. The purpose was to explore patterns of writing self-efficacy, anxiety levels, and student grade point average (GPA) in relation to student choices with help seeking, advanced planning of writing, revision habits, and response to feedback. Low writing self-efficacy, high anxiety students sought help from more sources, reported their feedback made them feel negative about their capabilities as writers, and were less likely to report reading and applying feedback to future writing efforts. No patterns of writing self-efficacy or anxiety levels emerged with respect to student revision habits or their choice to begin their assignments in advance of the due date. GPA was also not associated with the writing self-regulatory choices assessed. As the primary writing support for students in the later years of a nursing program, educators should consider interventions that encourage help seeking, facilitate students’ understanding and integration of the feedback they receive into their assignment revisions, and normalize the negative emotions that interfere with the self-efficacy levels required to write well.

Undergraduate Writing in a Second Language Context: Analysis of English Intra-Sentence Issues

This descriptive study investigates English intra-sentence writing challenges of undergraduate students in public educational institutions in Ghana. To achieve this, analyses of responses given in a short English language test administered to final-year undergraduate students studying English in four tertiary institutions are presented. The items constituting the test derived from intra-sentence deviations that featured prominently in 500 essays written by 250 undergraduate students between 2015 and 2017. The items involve topics that undergraduate students are assumed to have covered during their pre-tertiary education but which are areas of challenge to them. Test item analysis tables were devised to determine facility indices of the items and to ascertain the students’ implicit and explicit knowledge of the language features investigated. The study reveals that students pursuing undergraduate programmes in English Departments in Ghana have varied degrees of familiarity with defined intra-sentence writing issues. Additionally, the students’ implicit knowledge weightings of the topics investigated far outstrip their explicit knowledge values. Finally, the study suggests that the quantity of intra-sentence writing challenges of students from each of the institutions investigated is fairly congruent. These findings have pedagogical implications for the contents of the communication skills programmes mounted for all fresh undergraduate students in Ghana.

The Usefulness and Effectiveness of Argumentative Writing Self-assessment Checklist in Undergraduate Writing Classrooms

Writing instruction in the ESL classroom has evolved dramatically over the last few decades. Now, the focus has shifted from the final product of writing to the process of writing. The writing process is divided into three main stages: prewriting, writing and rewriting (Murray, 1985). This change has encouraged educators to look for strategies that focus on the writing process systematically and involve the learners to be focused and active at every stage of writing. One of the strategies that has been gaining popularity is self-assessment. It refers to teaching methods such as self-assessment checklist that prompt student writers to carefully think about, assess and respond to their written work systematically (Nielson, 2014). This study investigates the perception of teachers and students on the usefulness of a self-assessment checklist to assist students in the argumentative writing. Self-assessment Checklist for Undergraduate Argumentative Writing designed by Nimehchisalem et al. (2014) is used in this study. Feedback was obtained from four university writing lecturers through the Delphi method. The checklist was then implemented in the undergraduate writing classroom for a period of five weeks and students’ perception on the usability of the checklist was recorded through interviews. Observations were made to understand the implementation process of the checklist. From the experts’ feedback, a few changes were made to the checklist by adding, deleting, rewording and re-arranging items to ensure the checklist is more user- friendly. The experts perceived the checklist to be an effective tool in that it would reduce their workload especially regarding the amount of time spent providing feedback to the students. Students reported the checklist motivated them to write, created awareness on their writing ability, enhanced their understanding of argumentative writing, made them independent writers, and assisted them in writing more systematically. The observation enlightened the researchers on the items that needed more assistance or explanation from teacher during the training session.

Structural Features of Undergraduate Writing: A Computational Approach

Background: Over a decade ago, the Stanford Study of Writing (SSW) collected more than 15,000 writing samples from undergraduate students, but to this point the corpus has not been analyzed using computational methods. Through the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, this study attempts to reveal underlying structures in the SSW, while at the same time developing a set of interpretable features for computationally understanding student writing. These features fall into three categories: topic-based features that reveal what students are writing about; stance-based features that reveal how students are framing their arguments; and structure-based features that reveal sentence complexity. Using these features, we are able to characterize the development of the SSW participants across four years of undergraduate study, specifically gaining insight into the different trajectories of humanities, social science, and STEM students. While the results are specific to Stanford University’s undergraduate program, they demonstrate that these three categories of features can give insight into how groups of students develop as writers.Literature Review: The Stanford Study of Writing (Lunsford et al., 2008; SSW, 2018) involved the collection of more than 15,000 writing samples from 189 students in the Stanford class of 2005. The literature surrounding the original study is largely qualitative (Fishman, Lunsford, McGregor, & Otuteye, 2005; Lunsford, 2013; Lunsford, Fishman, & Liew, 2013), so this study makes a first attempt at a quantitative analysis of the SSW. When considering the ethics of a computational approach, we find it important not to stray into the territory of writing evaluation, as purely evaluative systems have been shown to have limited instructional use in the classroom (Chen & Cheng, 2008; Weaver, 2006). Therefore, we find it important to take a descriptive, rather than evaluative approach. All of the features that we extract are both interpretable and grounded in prior research. Topic modeling has been used on undergraduate writing to improve the prediction of neuroticism and depression in college students (Resnik, Garron, & Resnik, 2013), stance markers have been used to show the development of undergraduate writers (Aull & Lancaster, 2014), and parse trees have been used to measure the syntactic complexity of student writing (Lu, 2010).Research Questions: What computational features are useful for analyzing the development of student writers? Based on these features, what insights can we gain into undergraduate writing at Stanford and similar institutions?Methodology: To extract topic features, we use LDA topic modeling (Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003) with Gibbs Sampling (Griffiths, 2002). To extract stance features, we replicate the stance markers approach from a past study (Aull & Lancaster, 2014). To describe sentence structure, we use parse trees generated using Shift-Reduce dependency parsing (Sagae & Tsujii, 2008). For each parse tree, we use the tree depth and the average dependency length as heuristics for the syntactic complexity of the sentence.Results: Topic modeling was useful for sorting papers into academic disciplines, as well as for distinguishing between argumentative and personal writing. Stance markers helped us characterize the intersection between the majors that students hold and the topics that they are writing about at a given time. Parse tree complexity demonstrated differences between writing in different disciplines. In addition, we found that students of different disciplines have different syntactic features even during their first year at Stanford.Discussion: Topic modeling has given us a picture of interdisciplinary study at Stanford by showing how often students in the SSW wrote about topics outside their majors. Furthermore, studying interdisciplinary Stanford students allowed us to examine the intersection of a student’s major and current topic of writing when analyzing the other two sets of features. Stance markers in the SSW show that both field of study and topic of writing influence the ways in which students employ metadiscourse. In addition, when looking at stance across years, we see that Seniors regress towards their First-Year habits. The complexity results raise the question of whether different disciplines have different “ideal” levels of writing complexity.Conclusions: The present study yields insight into undergraduate writing at Stanford in particular. Notably, we find that students develop most as writers during their first two years and that students of different majors develop as writers in different ways. We consider our three categories of features to be useful because they were able to give us these insights into the dataset. We hope that, moving forward, educators will be able to use this kind of analysis to understand how their students are developing as writers.

Integrating Scientific Argumentation to Improve Undergraduate Writing and Learning in a Global Environmental Change Course

ABSTRACTWe present a strategy for using scientific argumentation in an early undergraduate laboratory course to teach disciplinary writing practices and to promote critical thinking, knowledge transformation, and understanding of the scientific method. The approach combines targeted writing instruction; data analysis and interpretation; formulation of a hypothesis; and construction of an argument. Students submit and receive feedback on two drafts of two different argumentation essays, providing the opportunity for guided practice. Each written argument is intended to draw on several weeks' course material, including short lectures, discussions, readings, and problem sets. Thus our aim with these writing assignments is to help students synthesize content and concepts, deepening their learning. We have found that this inquiry-based approach to writing engages students in course material, and significantly improves both writing and learning. We observed the greatest improvement among students with the lowest initial scores, suggesting that lower-achieving students benefitted disproportionately from this approach. Students have responded positively to the use of writing in the course, many stating on course evaluations that this is the first time they have received instruction in scientific writing. They have also pointed to a greater “big-picture” understanding of the course gained through writing. We describe the course and our curriculum, and provide suggestions for implementation as well as rubrics used to evaluate problem sets and student argumentation essays.

학부 유학생 글쓰기 강의 개선 방안 : 중앙대 강의 사례를 중심으로

학부 유학생 글쓰기 강의 개선 방안 : 중앙대 강의 사례를 중심으로

Integrating Open Digital Badges in an Undergraduate Writing Classroom

Integrating Open Digital Badges in an Undergraduate Writing Classroom

Textual appropriation in two discipline-specific undergraduate writings

Research has explored how scholars use citations to write intertextually across disciplines but have rarely compared how students, especially undergraduates, appropriate source texts in their writing in arts versus sciences. This study explores textual appropriation and source use in disciplinary writing of second language undergraduates in a North American university. Two samples of undergraduate writing were analyzed. One is a biology paper written by Cary to summarize a scientific concept or statement, and the other is an essay in Film Studies written by Martin on a topic of his own choosing. Text-based interviews were conducted to solicit participants’ comments and explanations of how they used source texts in completing the two specific disciplinary writing tasks. Results suggest different citing behaviors between the two students in terms of the types of sources they used (textbooks, monographs, and non-reading sources), the format of textual borrowing (quoting versus paraphrasing), and reasons for citing and not citing (e.g., to use others’ words or ideas versus expressing one’s own ideas or knowledge). The paper ends with an example of an assignment designed to help students explore how to make citation decisions in disciplinary writing.

Types of Undergraduate Writing Strategies and Student Awareness of performance

Types of Undergraduate Writing Strategies and Student Awareness of performance