Writing Assignments Across Five Academic Programs

Roger Graves University of Alberta

Introduction

What do we know about what students write in their undergraduate programs of study? Administrators usually do not have good data in answer to this question even during program evaluation events, often assuming that students write a lot, usually essays or reports. They tend to assume that students come to their institution with a general writing competency and that, perhaps through a required English literature course or even a writing course, generalized ability to write transfers to the demands of writing in all other disciplines of study. But instructors who have direct knowledge of students' failure to produce appropriate written work in their programs of study express puzzlement — or frustration — at the failure of students to transfer their success as writers in previous contexts (at the secondary level, in the required English literature course, or in their English language preparatory courses) to their written work in their major programs of study.

Similarly, those who work to help students develop as writers face the same problem: how can they help students write assignments in response to instructors' prompts? Writing centre tutors, writing course instructors, and writing program administrators generate knowledge about the challenges students face when they leave the tutorial or the course. Many writing centres collect examples of instructor's assignments and develop strategies for helping students with a particular assignment. Some instructors and program directors create courses that take as the subject of study writing in various academic contexts. Many administrators create their own writing support systems (tutors, online documents, workshops, even entire writing centres) in their own faculties to help students perform better as writers. In most instances, these academics lack data about what tasks their students actually face as writers. One of the consequences is writing support that, while well-intended, often misses the mark. Student writing outcomes often do not improve according to instructors in these programs.

My aim in this chapter is to provide data about the challenges students face as writers by describing in detail what they are asked to write. This research responds to the call from Anson and Dannels (2009) to create program profiles of departments in an effort to map the writing demanded of undergraduates onto the curriculums that they encounter. In an earlier study, Graves, Hyland, and Samuels collected a complete sample of syllabi from one college and 17 different departments. This article shows how writing assignments vary within a specific program at one college; that research provided us with a complete picture of writing tasks assigned to students within each of these programs. The broad actions we can take have been described elsewhere (Graves 2013, 2014). This chapter provides data and a more nuanced look at what instructors are actually asking students to write.

Why Do Assignment Genres Matter?

Fuller and Lee (2002) describe the ways that a writing assignment changes the subjectivity of a student as they go through the process of writing that assignment. They point out how "the student essay" as a genre contributes to creating "generic" subjects because of the ritualized nature of the essay as an assignment. Many instructors are unaware of how the assignments they choose to give students lead to this kind of subjectivity, while others create assignments to break from it. This is an important reason for all instructors to attend to the assignments they create: assignments that are too tightly controlled create a lack of agency in students. Tightly-controlled assignments can lead to disengagement from the intellectual tasks and lead to a sense among students that the writing they do is just a hoop to jump through in order to pass the course and complete the degree. For instructors, the results can lead to frustration with student writing and with students who ask the wrong question — "what does the prof want?" — rather than the right question: "What do I have to say about this topic?"

But as this chapter documents, assignments vary considerably from program to program and within programs. While some genres do dominate the lists of assignments — "papers" and presentations occur in all five disciplines reported in this chapter — in some disciplines, papers accounted for as many as 32% of assignments and as few as 10% of assignments. In some programs, we recorded over 50 different genre names given by instructors. Only one program, Nursing, came anywhere near having a dominant set of genres, with only 13 different assignments. In this case, however, the professional nature of the program had as its goal the creation of a professional mindset. Further, many of those assignments belonged to what could be called a "reflective practice" genre family. That the assignments in that group demanded that students reflect on their experiences would seem to counter the concern that they were not engaged in their studies.

Assignment Genres at the Post-Secondary Level: A Review of the Literature

Writing assignments have interested researchers at all levels of schooling since the 1980s (Applebee, Langer & Mullis, 1986; Bridgeman & Carlson, 1984; McCarthy, 1987; Canseco & Bird, 1989). Early work sometimes touched on writing assignments as a side issue (Kelly & Bazerman, 2003; Dias, Freedman, Medway & Paré, 1999; Dias & Paré, 2000; Beaufort, 2007; Brereton, 2007; Carson et al., 1992). At the secondary level, Applebee and Langer have done the most extensive research. In 2006, they reported that students in US schools wrote the following types of documents: narrative, analysis/interpretation, persuasion, log or journal, report on study or research, and summary of reading (Applebee & Langer, 2006). They note that at the grade 12 level only one-third of students write essays more than a few times each year. They also reported that in 1998 40% of Grade 12 students did not write papers longer than 3 pages, and that students in high school did not write long (more than 3 pages) or complex assignments. For Applebee and Langer, this presents two potential problems for high school graduates: students going on to post-secondary education will not be prepared for the demands of writing at that level, and students who go into the workforce will not have the advanced literacy skills needed to succeed there. Writing done in non-English classes decreases from grade 8 to grade 12 with fewer than 20% of math and science students writing even one paragraph each week. In a 2011 study, Applebee and Langer describe a system that has not changed significantly. However, Peterson and McClay (2010) report substantially more writing by grade 4-8 students in their survey of Canadian school teachers, with over half assigning a wide variety of types of writing. I could find no similar study of writing assigned to Canadian high school students, so we have no way of knowing if the trends reported by Applebee and Langer in 2006 extended to Canadian schools.

At the post-secondary level, much work has been done in the last 20 years. Several researchers have published work describing writing assignments across the disciplines (Light, 2001, 2003; Paltridge, 2002; Cooper & Bikowski, 2007; Melzer, 2003, 2009). Light's work on writing and student engagement provides the rationale for administrators to support writing instruction and support because Light's research showed that writing is the most important factor in creating student engagement (intellectual engagement; time spent on the course; or level of interest with the subject matter). But what do they write aside from examinations? Canseco and Byrd (1989) describe the writing assigned in graduate business courses: class-based assignments, case studies, and reports dominated. Moran (2013) found that psychology students wrote in only 25% of their courses the first two years of their degrees; in the third and fourth years, psychology students wrote mostly "summary/reactions to a reading" and "connection of theory with data." She also found that chemistry students wrote lab reports that grew in complexity as students advanced through the degree. Paltridge (2002) summarized the studies of Horowitz's (1986) and Braine's (1995) reports of writing assignments. Horowitz reported that liberal arts students at a small, teaching focused university wrote research essays, assignments that connected theory and data, summaries and reactions to readings, reports of experiences, case studies, research projects, and annotated bibliographies. Braine focused on natural sciences and engineering student assignments and found they clustered around five groups — summary /reactions, lab or experimental reports, design reports, case studies, and research papers — but were dominated by lab or experimental reports (75% of the total).

These studies, while useful, prompted other researchers to search out larger datasets in an effort to see if the results applied more broadly. Melzer's work focuses on writing across the curriculum approaches, identifying courses that have a writing across the curriculum focus and using Britton's (1975) taxonomy of purposes for writing (expressive, poetic, functional). Melzer's studies (2003; 2009; 2014) of assignments drew from syllabi available online at 100 different institutions in the US; this appears to be a convenience sample rather than a representative sample, and that is a significant limitation on his findings. In his studies he found that the overwhelming majority (83%) of assignments had transactional (using Britton's terminology) and informative (66%) as the purpose of the writing. Melzer's findings about the audience for assignments were similar to Britton's and Applebee's: Melzer reports that 64% of assignments were directed to the teacher as examiner (where the goal is to provide the correct answer), while Britton reported 48% and Applebee 55%. Britton reported that the teacher as audience, a more general category, applied to 86% of assignments. Melzer found a wide variety of genres of assignments in his sample, though he declined to categorize them or even list them.

While Melzer declined to classify the genres of writing assigned to students, Nesi and Gardner (2012) did not. They worked with the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus to identify the genres of writing students were asked to produce for grades in courses. Their goals were similar to ours: to document which genres tended to appear in which disciplines and at which levels of study; to identify these genres more accurately than instructors' naming conventions; and to give some sense of which genres dominated in particular disciplines. Their method differed from the other studies cited in this review because they examined the actual writing that students produced, and not just the assignment descriptions. They found thirteen genre families total, with only five genre families responsible for more than 5% of the total (Table 1).

Nesi and Gardner gathered specific genres announced in assignments into genre families, groups of genres linked by a common purpose, function, or structure (pp. 25-26). They identified three main purposes for student writing: demonstrate disciplinary knowledge; produce new disciplinary knowledge; and prepare for post-graduation employment. They organized their book largely by these purposes, exploring the genre families that supported student development towards those ends.

In the first study we completed (Graves, Hyland, & Samuels, 2010), we sought to identify the kinds of writing assignments undergraduates at a small liberal arts college wrote. We collected a complete sample of syllabi from one college (that is, every syllabus from every course in 17 different departments). This approach provided us with a complete picture of writing tasks assigned to students within each of these programs. That research responds to the call from Anson and Dannels (2009) to create program profiles of departments in an effort to map the writing demands of undergraduates onto the curriculums that they encounter. This chapter and the others in this book all respond in some way to the call for examining the writing students do in their programs of study. Each research group identified programs, collected data on the writing assignments required in the program, and then interacted with the program administrators to discuss the results. We began in 2008 with the programs reported in this chapter and expanded our scope as we gained federal funding and shared preliminary results. The results and what they mean are important, but the method is perhaps also significant because it focuses on assessing the programs, not the instructors, and provides a mirror of the curriculum to the people who run these programs. It is the image in that mirror that helps program administrators decide what, if any, changes they wish to make in their programs.

Methods: Developing a Coding Protocol and Guide

This chapter describes the genres of academic writing assignments identified in studies of writing assignments collected in 5 different programs of study (departments, college/faculties, and interdisciplinary programs). Our general process began by collecting syllabi. We communicated with administrators in the academic unit (dean's office, department chair, program director). These contacts then gathered the syllabi for us, compiled them into digital media (USB stick, CD_ROM, Google Drive folder), and forwarded them to our research group. Research assistants then read each syllabus to identify separate writing assignments; each assignment became one record in the database. We defined writing assignments as written assignments (including oral presentations) that were worth 5% or more of the final grade in the course. We did not code exams (midterm, quizzes, and finals) because we felt these written performances did not contribute to the development of writing ability: they were one-time events, not revisable, and did not allow for preparation activities that lead to writing development. Coders were trained using the coding guide in Appendix A.

Each assignment was coded for genre, length, feedback, topic choice, and other features. Appendix B is a copy of the print-based coding sheet we initially used before developing a web-based application for entering the results directly into a database. Research assistants read all syllabi twice and identified anomalies which were then discussed and adjudicated; specific issues for each project are described below. The data from the coding sheets was entered directly into a web-based application we developed that compiled the results into spreadsheets that were downloadable. These spreadsheets became the basis for the tables and charts that we created for our reports back to the academic unit that sponsored the research.

To control for reliability, coders flagged syllabi that presented problems for them. The research team met, discussed the anomalies, and created entries in the coding guide to record the decisions about how to handle these cases. We then went back into the database and re-coded the data to reflect the updated method.

Coding these assignments presented challenges of various kinds. In recording the genre of the assignment that the instructor gave, we sometimes encountered instructors who used more than one label to refer to the same assignment in their syllabus (and sometimes 3 or 4 distinct names). For example, an assignment labeled 'research paper' at the head of the assignment description was also called an 'essay' within the details of the assignment, and a 'field report' was labeled as 'literature review' in the assignment details. In these cases we used the first name or the name most often used in the syllabus. When we sought to identify assignments that were "linked" or "nested," we identified assignments that had more than one component (such as a separate mark for an abstract and for the main assignment); we did not code a group of assignments that were the same assignment repeated several times as linked, though we did code each iteration as a separate assignment. In categories such as explicit statements of learning goals, we coded any statement, however brief, as having that characteristic. Similarly, in the audience category we counted any mention, however brief, of the audience for the assignment. For the category of feedback to students, we did not include the offer of informal office hours; if students were required to meet with the instructor, we did categorize that as providing feedback.