writing center research project
1-5), where we analyze what specific abilities and skills tutors felt they gained from tutoring, the range of career paths tutors followed, and how the abilities and skills developed through tutoring were instrumental to tutors’ success in a wide range of careers. One of Concordia’s strongest values is its emphasis of creating and serving a community. Explain to them briefly what the Peer Tutor Alumni Research Project is about, give them your most recent list, and ask for their help. In the spring of 2009, two current WAs analyzed some of the data and produced an initial report that was sent to alums and some people on campus. We’d urge you to keep extending the deadline and periodically reminding people. • The Registrar’s Office or the Office of Student Records. I’ve also attached the questions as a Word document if you’d prefer to work offline and then email or snail mail them back to me. The important thing is to use the database in order to revise it into a reliable source of information. Start sending out surveys. This site was built using the UW Theme | Privacy Notice | © 2020 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. 7. I always felt privileged to work in the writing center as an undergraduate student. If you hit reply with quote, you can simply respond directly to me. Each group talked for two one-hour sessions, following an agenda we had worked out in advance. The goal of any database is to provide current and sufficient information. Harvey Kail All of the respondents gave glowing reviews, with several saying the experience played a role in their being awarded prestigious graduate fellowships and entry level jobs requiring strong communication skills. The resources I had access to were more than helpful for my personal works. Feedback, questions or accessibility issues: wcenter@writing.wisc.edu. Here are some we’ve had for our cover letters: It’s tricky to establish the ethos you want and to use the voice that your tutor alumni will remember, while communicating information efficiently and satisfying legal research requirements for informed consent. Tutors will appreciate your taking them and their experience seriously, and you will be building a formidable constituency of former tutor alumni from your writing center. Welcome to the Effective Writing Center! For more information about this research with Swarthmore alumni, please contact Jill Gladstein, Director of Writing, Swarthmore College, jgladst1@swarthmore.edu. If you have numerous alumni, you may want to send out surveys in small batches. Essentially, this means that you are responsible for insuring that the participants in the study understand their rights as research subjects. Who can access the information? Do these abilities play a role in your social or family relationships? Be sure to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope with your snail mailings. To see how we have incorporated these guidelines into our own cover letters, go to (cover letters) on our website. Plus, if you ever needed to call on former peer tutors for help convincing your administration of the value of your program, you know you can now reach them quickly and efficiently. Though we have a small pool of alumni from which to draw (63 peer tutors and writing fellows over the past 10 years), we are encouraged by the number of responses we have received thus far. I find myself completely at ease, whether I’m talking to a laborer fixing a section of railroad track, or meeting with the top Executive at a Fortune500 company. Keeping track of graduates is what they do. Some sample responses: Working with others and their writing has helped me be more understanding and insightful to the way other people think and communicate. The cover letter needs both to inform and to invite former tutors to take the time and care necessary to contribute to your research. Here are some of the research questions that participants in our CCCC session came up with: And some future research questions Paula Gillespie would like to answer about listening skills: From the moment we heard about the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project, we felt the University of Vermont Writing Center would be an excellent site for contributing to this research. Aside from the survey, I’m very much looking forward to hearing from you! The fall 2009 WAC Program newsletter features an article about the results. Even if you have more alumni, you may still choose to survey them all, so that you’re staying in touch with all of your alums, learning from all of them, and getting the broadest possible perspective on the peer-tutoring experience at your school. –Nathalie Virgintino, St. John’s University. I expect that the responses I receive will also become part of an archive at the Writing Center Research Project at the University of Louisville, so that your response can be a part of a larger national study that I expect to take place over the next year or so. A special thanks to session chair Jon Olson for taking these photos. Thanks! I will be describing this study and presenting preliminary results at a writing center conference in Pennsylvania in late October and at a composition conference in Texas next March. How did tutors translate tutoring experience and skills to graduate school, and what differences do they see? And one of the most fun. Brad Hughes How did you deal with that responsibility? How do writing center directors/administrators/educators get in tutors’ way? And it has helped me hone my analytical and critical thinking skills. Here are some useful headings: Name, graduation date, address, email, phone number, date survey sent, form of survey (snail mail, email, website), date returned, thank-you note sent, comments. The Writing Center Alumni poster represents the important abstract and tangible connections that inspired me to originally conduct more research on the field. We wanted to learn about their career paths and whether or not their tutoring experience influenced their career choices and/or enhanced their resumes. How did your time as a WA influence your college experience? How did your experiences as a WA transfer to your current profession? Almost every post-secondary school has an office of people in charge of keeping track of graduates. The list of alumni I contacted all tutored in the writing center at Concordia during their time as undergraduates. Did those abilities you developed seem to be a factor in your choice of job or further education? So to spread out both the work and the joy involved in this research and to fit it into your already crowded work life, you might want to use a batch approach and/or select a sample of alumni to survey. In any case I trust that you will find it worth your while. What happens to students who don’t succeed as peer tutors? To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Writing Associates (WA) Program at Swarthmore College and inspired by the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project, we decided in the fall of 2005 to survey former WAs about their experiences in the program and what they took from these experiences to their lives after college. You can, of course, always “Google” them. The National Research Act (l974) spells these guidelines out in detail (http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/). Be sure that your cover letter gives former tutors a reasonable deadline by which to respond. If you’ve got a large number of alumni, you might want to select a subset (or sample) of them to survey. If not, you can print out your message in a small font and then photocopy onto postcards: Give it another week or ten days. Did these abilities seem to play a role in your interviewing or hiring process? Without my work at the UWC, such professional opportunities would have never been created. If you’d like, you’re welcome to use any of the language in our samples without requesting permission; we’ll be delighted to think that you find any of it useful! Here, you can find resources to help you improve your writing. If you have some other specific goals for your research, you might select a sample to achieve those goals. Please go to our virtual Zoom room, or enter Meeting ID 949 513 8484, to check out our space and get registered! The survey reached eighteen active email inboxes and I received seventeen completed surveys, a response rate of 94%. Based on your experiences, how might we best develop the peer tutoring program at UM or MU? They will be delighted to hear from you. The above is a short summary of the research I completed this past semester for the graduate seminar on writing studies I was part of. The database won’t truly be completed until the project is over: in other words, your database is a work in progress. In my first “tutor biography” on our writing center’s website, I called tutoring symbiotic, stating that I would learn as much from the students I tutored as they learned from me. In spring 2009, undergraduates who had taken the one-credit experiential Peer Tutoring in the Disciplines course at George Mason University within the past 10 years were contacted and asked to fill out a survey asking them about what communication and community skills—academic and interpersonal—they felt they had acquired through the experience and how they were applying these skills in their lives after college. But even more so, I believe the PWTARP reminds us of how insightful such experiential learning can be for peer tutors. Our Writing Center has been run by the same co-directors since the year after it opened (1982), and so we have a personal connection to the over three hundred tutors who have worked here. By responding to this survey, you will be giving your permission for me to use your responses in this way. You are not required to complete or to sign the survey or to answer anything that might make you feel uncomfortable. What else did tutors learn from working in the writing center? If you feel you want to add anything I haven’t asked about, please do so. Now, when I look back at what I wrote as a sophomore, I am still amazed at the opportunities that have come from my work at the UWC. Research questions help writers focus their research by providing a path through the research and writing process. As we’ve piloted this research project, we’ve enjoyed that kind of collaboration on our campuses; not only have we gotten some good advice, but we’ve also discovered colleagues who are very interested in our research projects and are eager to help. If you could respond by March 1, 2004, that would insure that your response will be part of the original study. You probably already have that list or can put it together from your own tutor training course and writing center files–or maybe not. I learned how to ‘consult’ rather than ‘instruct.’ The experience of not telling someone what they should do, but instead walking them through the process of deciding what to do and granting them agency over their own problem has been incredibly valuable both personally and professionally. Where and how to start to find them? Make it clear that former peer tutors are not required to complete or sign the survey nor do they need answer any questions that make them feel uncomfortable. To have confidence that samples are representative, they are supposed to be random. Your research results will quickly repay the efforts to build the database. 04469 Recently my interest in former tutors has led me to engage in a research project that will look at the long and short-term effects of being a peer-writing tutor in college. And if you’re using email, you’ll want to come up with a subject line that won’t make your message look like spam. Some percentage of your former students’ current contact information will remain mysterious. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project, An Overview of the Writing Center for Instructors, Help Your Students Use the Writing Center Effectively, Understanding Informed Consent for Research Participants, http://www.umaine.edu/research/research-compliance/institutional-review-board-for-the-protection-of-human-subjects-irb/, introduction to sampling and to common sampling method. At the 2008 International Writing Centers Association Conference, we reported on what tutors saw as the importance of peer tutoring in three areas: their college experience, their development as writers, and their careers. –Kathy Evertz, Director, Academic Support Center, Carleton College. Tool to help students generate topic ideas for their research papers If you have a modest number of alumni (say, 50 or fewer), you may well want to send surveys to all of them, so that you will have a good number of responses to analyze. Be sure to send participating tutors a thank you note and/or a copy of your analysis of the data, a copy of the report you prepared for your chair, dean or director based on the survey, a copy of the paper on peer tutor alumni that you give at regional or national conferences, any publications that have resulted, etc. You’ve got a lot going for you given how positively alumni feel about their experience as peer tutors and given the warm relationship you had with your former tutors. Once you’ve gone to the considerable trouble of finding names and addresses of former tutors, you’ll want to be sure to get the highest return rate possible. Instead, you should aim to select a representative sample. The Maine group, a random selection of alumni from different classes, ranging from 1982 to 1999, met at the writing center for two hours and had a homemade chili dinner that Harvey made. As part of the Scholar-to-Scholar poster sessions at the recent IWCA-NCPTW conference in Baltimore, the PWTARP team (Harvey, Paula, and Brad) proudly shared our findings with many colleagues from around the US and beyond. Being expected to help other students improve their writing is a big responsibility. The University of Maine requires Harvey, for instance, to include the following information as part of the cover letter sent along with the survey: For further information on research with human subjects and implied consent, be sure to consult with the office of research and sponsored programs or human subjects review committee on your campus. How? What did they learn about other disciplines, or what more did they learn about their own? This site was built using the UW Theme | Privacy Notice | © 2020 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. I’m pleased to say that I have been asked to report on this project at the International Writing Centers Association Conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania at the end of October, and I would very much like to include your response. –Sue Dinitz and Jean Kiedaisch. harvey.kail@umit.maine.edu. What should we emphasize? And of course it’s tricky to accomplish these goals in a letter short enough to get read. I hope that you remember me and the times you spent training and working as a tutor in the University of Maine writing center. We were helped in our efforts to locate our former peer tutors by the Alumni Office, who also helped us develop our survey and accompanying letter. We’ve been sending out a new batch of 20 every six months or so. Phone: (800) 222-6544, Privacy Policy Legal Disclaimer Non-Discrimination Policy To see a before-and-after comparison, see http://www.mu.edu/writingcenter/newdigs. Did being a tutor shape or influence your sense of teaching and learning as a UM or MU student? Recently my interest in former tutors has led me to engage in a formal research project that is going to look at the long and short-term effects of being a peer writing tutor in college. 6. Your database of former peer tutors will continue to expand and develop over time, but even a partial if current list will give you access to the thoughts, memories, stories, and insights of students who have taken their peer tutor training and experience into their professional and personal lives and made good use of both. Be sure that your electronic mail mailings include clear instructions on how to return a digital version. Addresses, particularly email addresses, change often. The minimum postage for a first class letter will do the job. (Both focus groups will be held on October 16 in Milwaukee and Orono; both will be videotaped for analysis). It has made me a better writer and a better communicator. And please be honest—there are no particular answers I’m looking for; what I’m looking for are honest, thoughtful, candid, and detailed reflections on your experience. I’ve pasted the survey below and have attached it as a Word document you can fill out and attach to a return e-mail. Although this list suggests that there is a simple, linear process to writing such a paper, the actual process of writing a research paper is often a messy and recursive one, so please use this outline as a flexible guide. Experienced, successful researchers often experience writing and researching as a back-and-forth process, and … From experience, though, we’d urge you not be too ambitious or in too much of a hurry. The length of time it will take to complete the questions will vary with your answers and your experience. At the 2011 STU Undergraduate Research Symposium, I was awarded the Dean’s Excellence in Research Award for both the research and the professional outcomes that have arisen from the project and the poster. What were the most significant skills, values, and/or abilities that they developed in their work as consultants? Many thanks to Terry Maggio, from UW-Madison’s Writing Center, for designing this gorgeous poster and a big thanks to Jon Olson for sharing these wonderful photos. (You can photocopy multiple copies of these words and scotch tape them to the envelope.) Think for a minute about this communication situation. You then send surveys to c. 20 alumni, spread across all the different years of graduation. Alumni said the job enhanced their collaborative skills, taught them how to negotiate relationships in a variety of settings, and taught them to ask generative questions. In what ways have these qualities or values helped to develop your sense of self? You can also send the names of those missing in action to those who have already responded to the survey with your request for help: do you know how one might reach them? The responses will be coded to the master list of former peer writing tutors, and should I quote you in any form, I will not use your name and will seek your permission first. Because the addresses, email, and phone number that you get from your campus experts will in many cases be out of date, you have a first draft. Unless you have the help of others, such as current tutors, working in small batches is worth considering. How did your listening skills affect the students you worked with? We received responses from 41 consultants, a response rate of 76%. We don’t pretend that our letters are Platonic ideals; in fact, we’re sure that you can do better. These connections are not only fostered by the tutees that enter through our doors, but have also been experienced by the tutor alumni that have greeted them on the other side. (Click here for a list. 3. A focus group that asks tutor alumni about long- and short-term effects of their tutoring might be one of the most gratifying professional events you ever have. Focus groups can help you uncover research topics and questions you might not have considered; they give tutor alumni a chance to put their own stamp on your research by touching on those areas that are most important to them. Remember me and the times you spent training and working as a WA transfer to your current profession better.! ’ t pretend that our letters are Platonic ideals ; in fact, we re... Working as a WA influence your college experience Academic Support center, Carleton college feel... Database is to provide current and sufficient information students improve their writing is big! 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