Summary of Findings from Focus Groups, Survey, and Proficiency Essays

(from Thaiss and Zawacki, Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life, Heinemann, in press)



1. Like our faculty informants, students tended to describe standards for “good” writing in their disciplines in general academic terms: “concise,” “clear,” “logical,” “thorough,” “grammatically correct.” 
 
However, when asked to make comparisons between disciplines in which they’ve written extensively, they could make specific distinctions. Students with double majors or in interdisciplinary programs could do this most readily.

Students in the focus groups also saw a clear distinction between the writing they are doing in the academy and the writing they perceive they will be asked to do (or are already doing) in the “real world.” Again, however, they rely on general terms to describe writing in the workplace—“concise,” “clear,” “to the point.”


2. While the students in focus groups described expectations for good writing in general terms, most saw their professors as idiosyncratic in their expectations.

 Perhaps as a result, they placed most emphasis on feedback they received on the first paper of a course as an index of the teacher’s expectations.

 A teacher’s lecture/classroom style was another important indicator of their expectations for writing.

 Some students said they learned by reading course materials but were not clear about how their reading informed their writing unless there was an emphasis on format of a scientific report.

 A surprising number had read articles or books their teachers had written and appreciated this insight into the teacher’s writing style.


3. In all three groups, "research, research, research" is the main type of writing they do, regardless of major.

Again,  more experienced students could explain differences between disciplines in what this "research" entailed, and in the formats and types of evidence expected.

4. Focus group and survey students want to please their teachers, even if this means giving up their own ideas about how to best respond to the assignment.

A surprising number also said they tried to write in ways that wouldn’t bore their teachers; however, those who want to be original also feared that they “don’t know what the professors’ ideas of originality are.”

In focus groups and on the survey, students expressed a fairly high degree of confidence in their ability to write in the ways they thought their teachers expected. Yet their reliance on teacher cues—first paper, classroom style--may indicate that they are more adept at decoding teachers’ expectations than disciplinary expectations.

*The writers of the proficiency essays stood out for their ability to explain how they could conform to disciplinary conventions while also expressing their own ideas in writing.

5. Three Stages of Writing Development “Into” a Discipline

In the first stage, the student uses very limited experience in academic writing, one or two courses perhaps, to build a general picture of “what all teachers expect.” If, for example, a composition teacher or textbook imposes a list of “do’s and don’t’s in college papers,” such lessons are apt to stick, especially in the absence of contrary experiences in the first year.

In the second stage, more advanced students, such as some of those third- and fourth-year students we interviewed in our focus groups, move to a radically relativistic view-- “they all want different things”--after they have encountered teachers’ differing methods, interests, and emphases. Students in this stage see teachers as idiosyncratic, not as conforming to disciplinary standards, and they are likely to feel confused and misled as teachers use the same terms to mean different things.

In the third stage, which not all students reach in their undergraduate years, the student uses the variety of courses in a major: varying methods, materials, approaches, interests, vocabularies, etc., toward building a complex, but organic sense of the structure of the discipline. Some of our focus group informants and virtually all of the proficiency essay writers demonstrated this sense of coherence-within-diversity, understanding expectations as a rich mix of many ingredients.

A crucial element of this third stage vision is the student’s sense of his or her productive place within the disciplinary enterprise.
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Some Implications of This Research for Teachers

1. Careful assignment design: students need models, rubrics, and disciplinary examples of terms like “clear thesis” or “concise sentences.”

Teachers across disciplines need to be prepared to help students negotiate the general terms they and other faculty often use to describe their expectations (e.g., "logic," "clarity," "evidence"). When very real differences are cloaked in the language of similarity, it’s understandable that students rely only on other cues to guide their writing (feedback on the first paper, lecture styles, etc).


 2. When we ask for "original thinking" or "your own conclusions," we need to show what this might mean--especially in writing based on the research of others.

 Students have internalized an array of different messages about “voice” and “originality.” Many think that “voice” and “originality” are only desirable in English classes. Many don’t understand what teachers mean when they ask for original thinking, especially when they are writing from research. When we talk about voice with our students, we need to explore with them all the ways that their voice(s) can be heard no matter what course/major they are writing for and what it might mean to be original in their chosen disciplines and in the teacher's particular subdiscipline and course.

3. We need to explain to students the methods, scope, and discourses of our branches and research felds within the larger discipline.

 Between the sparse principles of “academic writing” and the idiosyncratic desires of the professor, there exist often unarticulated and unexamined (by both faculty and students) concepts of the writing characteristics of  “the discipline,” of specialties within disciplines, and of local or institutional particularities (e.g., policies). If faculty wish to impart these important nuances to students, then they need much more clearly to articulate the ways of thought, procedures, and formal structures of what they call “the field”—plus common alternatives and their own divergences.

4. Feedback to students on their writing is crucial to student understanding of the discipline and the discourse.

We were gratified to find that most of our focus group students had teachers in their majors who gave them feedback on their writing and, often, the opportunity to revise. "How else can we improve ?" some said.

To a person, these students said that feedback on the first paper of a course was the most useful.

Proficiency essay writers credited the detailed commentary of specific teachers for giving them the most insight into how to write in the discipline.

5. We need to help students find and express their passions for learning within the assignments we give.

All our faculty informants talked passionately about their scholarship and their disciplines; moreover, all emphasized undergraduate students' "engagement" with the subject. Moreover, most department rubrics include "original thinking" as a criterion for student writing.

BUT only our most proficient, experienced student informants saw a connection between their passion for learning and their learning the conventions of the discipline. Most of our focus group informants saw meeting their professors' expectations as requiring submergence of their own voices and interests. "Either get the grade or do what you want; you can't do both."

6. We need to give students opportunities to write reflectively on their growth as writers.

We were impressed by the maturity and discipline-awareness of focus-group informants who said that they had been asked by teachers to write occasionally about their growth as learners and writers. These were more likely to have a "third-stage" understanding of disciplines, as well as confidence to realize their own goals in a disciplinary framework.