Cosgrove, Cornelius. “What Our Graduates Write: Making Program Assessment Both Authentic and Persuasive.” College Composition and Communication. 62.1 (2010). 311-336. ProQuest. Web. 5 March 2011.
After having read the best teaching-related articles in the most recent issue of CCC, I decided to go back to the December issue to look for other useful articles. In this article that also relates to assessment again, the author discusses how studying the writing practices of graduates of a writing program can help faculty assess the effectiveness of a program. The author also looks at how this practice can help the public outside of the field to understand the nature of composition studies. Rather than just focusing on “good writing”, which is often defined differently by different people inside and outside of academia, the author argues for focusing on whether the writing courses prepared alumni to effectively write in the authentic writing situations they typically encounter in their lives after they graduate. The author conducted a study that surveyed several hundred graduates from the previous seven years and analyzed the survey results to determine how the writing program had helped students in their current writing and about what might be added to courses to better prepare students for the writing they would do once they graduated. It is interesting how the article ties in nicely with some of the concepts we have been reading about in Driscoll and Wood, but this article also look beyond classroom assessment to overall program assessment after the fact.
I’d be really interested to learn more about the conclusions the researchers drew about what needed to be added to courses. So many university classes and learning communities involve writing of some kind or other that knowing what activities best prepare students for writing in their professional futures would be exceptionally helpful. Perhaps this might prove a productive reading for a future iteration of CTCH 602, or even perhaps investigating the Writing Across the Curriculum principles as an area of study?