Jeanne Garland

Trendy technology or a learning tool?: Using electronic journaling on WebNotes/sup TM/ for curriculum integration in the freshman program in engineering at ASU

Lately, technology has transformed our world, with millions of users negotiating everything from purchasing goods to accessing research. The pressure to embrace this technology has grown to the point that even in the composition classroom, instructors are exploring ways to most profitably use it. Given the growth and commercialism of the World Wide Web (WWW), it is not always easy to distinguish the hype from the useful. The authors argue that, however, one such worthwhile application is WebNotes/sup TM/ a commercial, WWW-based electronic forum software product that has become a powerful journaling tool for fostering connections, delivering information, and creating an online community in and out of the classroom.

Scaling up Arizona State University's first-year integrated program in engineering: problems and solutions

This paper discusses how scale-up from a pilot of 32 students to 80 students affected the integrated delivery of material in English composition, physics and engineering to a cohort of freshman engineering students. It also discusses how collaborative learning and projects were structured to fit 80 students, the effects of class size on student-to-student interaction and student-to-faculty interactions in and out of the classroom and what modifications were made to the classroom facilities to accommodate these projects. Although there were some detrimental effects accruing to the scale-up, for the most part, student performance was unaffected or slightly improved.

An effective peer revision method for engineering students in first-year English courses

Peer revision workshops are a common feature in most composition classes; however, too often students complain that they gain little from having their peers read their writing. They feel that their peers know as little as they do, and although practice shows that peer reviewers are able to identify problematic areas in a paper, student-writers are often unwilling to listen to the advice of their peers. Similarly, some teachers have unrealistic expectations for peer review sessions, some give extensive peer review sheets that take vast amounts of time to complete, and some offer their students little in the way of advice as to how to comment on another students paper. The result can be frustrating for all involved. However, by carefully constructing peer review sheets that match the assignment sheet, grading criteria for the assignment, and the goals for the course, instructors can create effective peer review sessions from which student writers benefit. In this paper, the authors present a guided peer revision tool that can be adapted for any assignment which enables student writers to act as effective peer reviewers.

Views About Writing Survey-a new writing attitudinal survey applied to engineering students

The development and initial administration results of a new attitudinal instrument, the Views about Writing Survey (VAWS), are presented. The goal of the VAWS is to measure the attitudes, beliefs, values, and perceptions that students have about writing at the beginning of the composition course and again at the end of the semester to show if and how their attitudes change. To this end, the instrument is used as a pre- and post- semester tool to compare students taught in a traditional English course with those taught in an English course that has been integrated with the engineering, physics, and calculus courses. The VAWS was administered to 50 freshmen engineering students within the Foundation Coalition program and to 155 freshmen students within regular sections of English in the first week and again in the last week of classes in the fall semester of 1997. This paper discusses the development of the instrument including the course objectives addressed by the survey. Further, initial validation results of this new instrument and statistical results from comparisons of the engineering students within the Foundation Coalition and students in regular English courses are presented.

Goals, objectives, and performance criteria: a useful assessment tool for students and teachers

In this paper, the authors discuss how they have applied the Assessment Plan Development Guide developed by Gloria M. Rogers and Jean K. Sando at Rose Hulman for the Foundation Coalition to the English Freshman Composition course in the first-year integrated program in engineering at Arizona State University, USA. Assessment in composition courses is especially difficult, and experts in composition disagree on the nature and validity of assessment. However, to examine student learning and course effectiveness, instructors need assessment tools. Their goals/objectives/performance matrix has enabled them to begin this assessment. Although originally developed for freshman composition, they have found that this matrix which defines goals, objectives and performance criteria can easily be employed by instructors in other disciplines. Developing such a matrix not only provides instructors with a useful assessment tool, it also provides them with a powerful tool for reevaluating course content and course development. It also provides students with a way to reflect on and evaluate their own learning, and when students are self-reflective about their own learning, they believe that they tend to do better.

A process to begin integrating first-year composition and engineering: or how to talk to an English department

Arizona State Universitys Foundation Coalition Program for first-year-engineering students is one of the few programs that integrates English (first-year composition courses) with engineering courses. So successful has this integration been that we now offer a separate section of English for engineers. We are aware that there are a number of barriers that make such integration difficult. These barriers include basic problems such as not understanding what is typically taught in first-year composition classes and who does the teaching. In most English departments, first-year English classes are composition classes, and are under the auspices of the Rhetoric and Composition faculty. Some of these faculty members feel strongly that composition classes should deal with issues of rhetoric, and they believe that integration with another subject will weaken their own subject area. Another problem is that Teaching Assistants teach most composition classes. Therefore, the possibility of involving tenured faculty in the reaching of integrated classes may be remote, and engineering departments who approach English departments with this goal in mind may be quickly disappointed. However, in a number of institutions, composition classes are also taught by instructors and lecturers who may be more willing to undertake such courses. In this paper, we discuss ways to approach an English department to begin the process of integration, staffing such courses, persuasive benefits engineering can offer English departments, and some areas of integration that can occur in composition classes.