Grant Year 3 Report

The year for our Writing Initiative ends at the close of October and so we are now into year 4 of the grant.

In the program narrative, 28 objectives are identified to be completed by the end of the five-year project period. During year three, the narrative directed the team to focus on the six specific objectives, which are summarized below and will be covered in more detail in future posts.

This past year the Team has worked with faculty to design seven new writing intensive (WI) courses. Five were piloted in year three and two are being piloted in the fall 2010 semester. We also trained 14 new WI instructors and launched 8 new sections of previously developed courses.

In addition to the program assessments done by Institutional Research, we have added our own course-based assessments of all WI courses offered through the artifacts in student ePortfolios.

We also conducted our first student and faculty surveys and focus groups following the spring 2010 semester.

In faculty development, we have now trained 38 full-time and part-time instructors in teaching WI courses and in using the technologies, critical thinking and information literacy.

We have served more than 600 WI students so far in the Writing Center, through one-on-one appointments and student workshops.

After the October 2009 visit by our outside evaluators, their report identified areas for improvement that included branding, the Task Force, writing rubric alignment, working with faculty, clarifying WI minimum requirements, faculty compensation and course-based assessment via portfolios.

We will address those areas in future posts as we prepare for our outside evaluation visit on November 30.