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...