Nessie on Writing

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE, known as "Nessie") released its annual report this past Monday; the report itself can be found here, and a press release about the report is here. The report has received a lot of media attention, at USA Today, Inside Higher Education, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The NSSE is interested, as their title suggests, not so much in how much or how well students are learning, but how engaged they are in what they're learning. To measure that, they have developed five "Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice": the level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment.

• The level of academic challenge is surveyed with questions concerning how many books and papers of various lengths are assigned, to what extent coursework emphasized "ANALYZING the basic elements of an idea, experience, or theory, such as examining a particular case or situation in depth and considering its components," "SYNTHESIZING and organizinig ideas, information, or experiences into new, more complex interpretations and relationships," "MAKING JUDGMENTS about the value of information, arguments, or methods, such as examining how others gathered and interpreted data and assessing the soundness of their conclusions," and "APPLYING theories or concepts to practical proglems or in new situations." It also asks students to identify whether they had "worked harder than you thought you could to meet an instructor's standards or expectations."


• The active and collaborative learning benchmark generates questions regarding the student's contributions to class discussion, giving of class presentations, working with other students on projects in or out of class, tutoring or teaching other students, participation in community or service learning, and so on.


• The student-faculty interaction benchmark asks to what extent students "discussed grades, assignments, ideas, career plans with a faculty member," "worked with a faculty member on activities other than coursework," or "worked on a research project with a faculty member."


• The enriching educational experiences benchmark asked students about interactions with people who are "very different" from them in views, ethnicity, or class, their participation in organizations and class listservs and web-boards, their experience with community service, learning communities, study abroad, and capstone experiences.


• And the supportive campus environment benchmark explores students' experiences with institutional support for academic, social, and other non-academic success, and their relationships with other students, faculty members, and staff and administration.

The first two of those, the level of academic challenge and active and collaborative learning, are the benchmarks of most obvious traditional interest to writing programs--and the results provide the kind of numerical justification that deans will take seriously for the pedagogical best practices that have been established by five decades of research in composition studies.

But the other benchmarks are surely relevant too, if a writing program aspires to teach not just the mechanics of writing but writing as a lifelong engagement with various personal and professional discourse communities. What forms of community service, learning communities, and interethnic involvement might be incorporated into FYW instruction? One of our instructors, Phyllis Nobles, will be pairing her students up in the spring with international students, having them do things together--go to a movie, go to a sporting event, work on a project together, etc.--and then talk and write about the experience. What writing-related activities could FYW faculty and their students work on together outside of class?

This year the NSSE worked collaboratively with the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) to develop 27 new questions about writing instruction. These were grouped into five scales:

• Pre-Writing Activities: How much students got feedback from faculty and others about their writing ideas and drafts


• Clear Expectations: How much instructors provided clear explanations of the goals and criteria of the writing assignments


• Higher-Order Writing: How much students wrote assignments involving summarization, analysis, and argument


• Good Instructor Practices: How much students collaborated with classmates, reviewed sample writing, and assigned practice writing tasks


• Integrated Media: How much students included numerical data, multimedia, and visual content in their writing

These new questions were given to 23,000 students at 82 U.S. institutions of higher education. The NSSE's summary suggests that "while a majority of students usually talked with instructors to develop ideas and received feedback about drafts from faculty and others, less than a third of first-year students and only one in five seniors regularly sought help from writing centers. The most common writing tasks were to analyze something or argue a position, while writing about numerical data was less common. Finally, most students said their instructors explained their learning objectives and grading criteria in advance, but fewer reported short writing assignments that were not graded or the use of peer review, particularly in the senior year."

And they note:

Results affirmed that when institutions provided students with extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the students engaged in more deep learning activities such as analysis, synthesis, integration of ideas from various sources, and grappled more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. In turn, students whose faculty assigned projects with these same characteristics reported greater personal, social, practical, and academic learning and development. Taken together, these findings provide further support for the movement to infuse quality writing experiences throughout the curriculum.

To view the NSSE survey, go here.