McNeese State University - Write to Excellence

Your questions about Write to Excellence are invited. If you have questions relating to any phase of the Quality Enhancement Plan (for example, writing enriched courses, freshmen foundations classes, assessment issues, the writing center, the faculty focus group, or the various committees associated with the QEP), please submit your questions to hstevens@mcneese.edu.

Questions from
Dustin M. Hebert, Ed.S.
Lecturer in Educational Technology
Department of Educational Leadership and Instructional Technology
McNeese State University
P.O. Box 91815
Lake Charles, LA 70609
337.475.5424 (v)
337.475.5402 (f)
mailto:dhebert@mcneese.edu

I have some questions about "writing-enriched" (WE) courses.

1. Is each department required to have at least one WE course?

At this phase of the Quality Enhancement Plan, only those courses that are used to fulfill the general education or core requirements are being considered at the university level for writing enrichment. For example, Environmental Science 101 and 102 are currently used by students to fill a six-hour portion of the Natural Science requirement under the general education requirements. Those teaching in Environmental Science are free to decide if either ENSC 101 or 102 or both will be converted to a writing enriched sequence. They will make the choice. If a Department like History comes to a decision that none of their courses will be writing enriched, that is their call. Students will have to look elsewhere for humanities courses that are writing enriched because students will be required to complete a minimum of 9 credit hours of writing enriched courses in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts array of core courses starting in the 2008 – 2009 academic year.

Since the Department of Educational Leadership and Instructional Technology does not offer courses that are used in the core or gen. ed. requirements, as far as I am aware, your unit is not being asked to create writing enriched courses at this time. However, departments will be asked to enrich with writing some of their required major courses in the next phase in the development of the writing initiative.

2. For a course to be WE, what percent of the course grade must be generated from writing assignments?

For a course to be designated as Writing Enriched, a minimum of 20 percent of the course grade will be derived from writing efforts on the part of the student. How the 20 percent is distributed in the course will be decided by the faculty and the department offering all sections of the course. For example, if ENSC 102 is designated as a writing enriched course, all sections of ENSC 102 will be writing enriched. The faculty teaching in that course will have to work together to structure the revised course to include some kind of graded writing work on the part of the student (reports, term paper, short essays, tests or some other type of writing assignment). It is also expected that the writing components in any course will be distributed throughout the semester. Assigning a term paper or a project that includes writing tasks at the end of the semester does not give students the opportunity to develop writing skills over the course of the semester. A better plan would be to break the project or term paper into segments and stretch them across the semester, giving students feedback on writing throughout the semester.

3. If a WE course is taught, will the committee's writing rubric have to be used for artifact evaluation?

The short answer is “partly.” But the situation is fluid. The basic concept is to construct a generic grading rubric to recommend to faculty who teach writing enriched classes. The idea is to produce a generic rubric that can be modified and adapted to any course. During the site visit, the SACS visiting team added another feature to the common rubric idea, an aspect that is yet to be worked out to the satisfaction of all.

SACS has recommended that part of the evaluation of the overall effectiveness of the Quality Enhancement Plan include the assessment of student learning outcomes associated with the QEP. This recommendation requires that the writing-enriched courses across the campus include a set of common student learning outcomes and some kind of common assessment tool. One idea that has been advanced is to ask that writing enriched courses include four common features in addition to the course-specific or discipline-related items comprising the rubric used for the assessment of student learning outcomes (SLO) associated with writing:

SLO-1. Students demonstrate an awareness of audience and purpose.
SLO-2. Students construct logically ordered, adequately developed, and unified paragraphs.
SLO-3. Students construct grammatically correct sentences.
SLO-4. Students demonstrate mastery of standard American English usage and mechanics (e.g., spelling, capitalization, punctuation, noun-pronoun agreement, and subject-verb agreement).