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EVALUATION OF THE COLLEGE WRITING SEMINAR
JUNIATA COLLEGE
INTRODUCTION
On Wednesday, April 14, an external review team comprised of Steven Knepper,
doctoral student in English from the University of Virginia; Noreen Lape, Director of the
Writing Program at Dickinson College; and Joe Schall, Health Communications
Specialist with a federal government agency visited Juniata College to review the College
Writing Seminar (CWS).
Prior to the visit, we reviewed syllabi, CWS CORE goals, library usage reports, training
documents, and the CWS self-study report. At Juniata, we met with students,
administrators, and faculty – both full-time and adjunct, and from several disciplines.
This report details the strengths of the CWS program goals and offers recommendations
for growth and improvement.
STRENGTHS
Juniata’s basic mission -- embodied within its “think, evolve, act” slogan -- is to provide
a flexible learning environment for individual growth while encouraging social and civic
responsibility. Juniata is visibly interested in engaging students as learners, offering an
empowering and personalized educational experience, and encouraging students toward a
fulfilling life of service and ethical leadership in the global community.
By its design, the CWS fundamentally serves the College’s mission. As expressed in the
CORE document, writers in CWS are given both individual and group feedback, taught
argumentative and analytical strategies, and encouraged to read critically and
analytically. Further, students can self-select a full-year or spring semester course option
if the fall one-semester offering does not meet their needs or if they fail to complete the
fall course successfully. The one-credit CWS Lab gives students the opportunity for both
social and personal growth, while the requirement of a final portfolio helps not only to
foster academic rigor but also to provide the basis for a writing assessment plan.
In meeting with both faculty and students involved in CWS, the reviewers noted the
following program strengths:
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the teaching of writing as a process and acknowledgment by course instructors
that rhetorical strategies must be taught rather than assumed;
the integration of library research and source citation strategies;
the use of individual conferences with students on at least one of their papers,
which requires students to have one-on-one interaction and guidance from a
faculty member;
the enrollment cap of eighteen students per section, which ensures a more
intimate learning environment and allows for more one-on-one interaction
between instructors and students;
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the use of both adjunct instructors and instructors from outside of the English
Department, which lends more diversity to the teaching pool and offers students
more choices and different kinds of potential mentors;
the integration of current, timely, and engaging issues into the course curriculum,
like “Writings by Recent Pulitzer Prize Winners” and “Peace, War, and
Terrorism”;
the use of the Hofelt prize for freshman writing, in that programs at many schools
do nothing to acknowledge superior writing by first-year students;
the opportunity for structured peer networking and connecting with upper-class
mentors via the CWS Lab, which students voiced as highly important to their
integration into the college community;
close interaction between the CWS Lab leaders and the CWS Dean of Students
Office, underscoring the principle that, as noted by the Assistant Dean of
Students, CWS can be a “bellwether for how things will go for the student at
Juniata in general”;
the fact that 10-15 students per year receive a failing grade in the class, suggesting
that the class involves high standards and that CWS faculty have not bowed to the
national trend of grade inflation.
RECOMMENDATIONS
In light of current trends and developments in writing program administration, we
recommend that the CWS Program consider these issues:
General Administration
 The Writing Program would benefit from greater coherence created by a Writing
Program Administrator who would oversee CWS, CW, and the Writing Center.
The faculty we met were pleased with and enthusiastic about the new CW goals;
many felt the old goals were so generalized as to be meaningless. However, it
was not clear to us who would be responsible for administering the CW courses
and whether there had been meaningful conversation about the connection
between the learning goals for CWS and CW courses. A Director of Writing,
who served mainly as an administrator with a modest teaching load, could oversee
the Writing Program curriculum and develop an assessment plan with the help of
an oversight committee comprised of faculty, student lab leaders, and invested
administrators.
College Writing Seminar
 Decide whether to model CWS after a First-Year Composition (FYC) or FirstYear Seminar (FYS) model. The CWS curriculum lacks consistency in practice.
Some faculty we spoke to described a course that focused almost entirely on
writing skills (FYC) while others shaped the course around themes like “The
Cultural History of Blues and Jazz” and “Peace, War, and Terrorism” (FYS),
presumably with a broader emphasis on critical reading, writing, and academic
exchange. When we spoke to students, they said they had no idea that some of
the courses had themes. If they had known, they said, they would have chosen
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more their sections more strategically. Further, an FYS model is more consistent
with programs at peer and aspirant colleges.
Revisit CWS learning outcomes in order to create more of a balance between
instructor autonomy and shared program goals. One area of concern arose from
students who complained that the amount of reading and writing varied
significantly from course to course. How many essays (or written pages, to be
more flexible) should professors assign? This may be only one area in which the
program needs to achieve consensus while honoring instructor autonomy in other
areas like selection of theme, choice of readings, and creation of assignments.
Since administrators told us that the goal is to recruit faculty from other
disciplines to teach CWS, work to achieve more faculty buy-in. Faculty from
disciplines other than English are reluctant to teach a course in first-year
composition that they feel unequipped to teach. While achieving faculty buy-in
can be a long and difficult process, there are several ways to move in that
direction. As one faculty member told us, “use a carrot and remove any
obstacles.” The CWS Program can also
o get more faculty involved in designing and interpreting CWS program
outcomes;
o move toward an FYS model in which they choose their own course
content, rather than an FYC model, which is typically seen as the purview
of English instructors;
o offer remuneration in the form of stipends, release time, and/or credit for
the annual reviews.
Keeping with the idea of removing obstacles, offer faculty development
workshops. Many faculty from disciplines other than English are often
uncomfortable teaching the first-year course that introduces students to academic
discourse. Significantly, one faculty member from outside of English currently
teaching CWS said that his interest in doing so was sparked by a faculty
development workshop. Despite the fact that many faculty write to produce their
own scholarship, their knowledge of how they write, not to mention how other
people learn to write, is tacit. Allow faculty opportunities to develop their skills
to teach writing by offering workshops on the nuts and bolts: writing effective
assignments, sequencing assignments, facilitating revision, and responding to
student writing, to name a few. These workshops could be offered either by
current teachers of CWS and/or by faculty from other institutions. Further, use
materials that faculty develop as a result of those workshops as practical examples
of CWS writing objectives. In other words, what assignments do fellow faculty
use to teach argument and analysis, audience and sentence style, etc.? In so
doing, broad program goals become anchored to specific examples.
CWS Laboratory Component
 Revisit the relationship between the CWS lab and the CWS seminar. Some
professors work closely with their lab instructors, making sure that the lab
complements the seminar. Other professors, though, do not seem to work very
closely with their lab instructors. In these sections, the lab seems to become more
of an extension of the orientation process, rather than one credit of a robust first
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year writing course. Indeed, from our observations, it appears that very few lab
sections are being used for serious writing instruction/reinforcement.
Incorporate lab projects into the CWS seminar’s writing and thematic goals for
the semester. We heard about sections that integrated lab and seminar, like the
“Blues and Jazz” course in which students formed a band, developed promotional
material, and organized a concert. Yet it seemed that many other lab projects,
especially some of the service-based projects, had only a tenuous relationship to
the content of the seminar. This perception was reinforced by conversations with
students.
As with CWS writing requirements, make lab projects fairly uniform in scope and
depth (while maintaining instructor autonomy in regard to content). Many
students complained that the lab projects required widely differing levels of time
commitment and academic skill. These were probably the most forceful
complaints we heard during our review. To paraphrase one student, “Some labs
pet puppies at the SPCA; ours wrote a fifteen-page research essay.” We suggest
that the CWS faculty develop a clearer set of shared guidelines for the lab project.
Revisit the “EO” element in the lab curriculum, preferably through a committee
of CWS professors, invested administrators, and student lab leaders. Are the
learning objectives for the course relevant—especially in terms of lab and seminar
integration? One student in particular praised the CWS lab’s “extended
orientation” content and assignments for being relevant to his experiences as a
freshman. A few other students, however, said that this material felt a bit
redundant. One solution is to make the lab more of a workshop for peer review
and targeted writing instruction. One way to deal with the issue of training lab
leaders for these tasks would be to require them to take the one-credit peer
tutoring course. Another way would be to integrate CWS lab more closely with
the writing center, drawing lab leaders from a necessarily expanded pool of
writing tutors.
Program Assessment
 Relinquish the attempt to prove value-added to writing skills after a one semester
course. If the CWS chooses to conduct value-added assessment, assess the
writing skills of students after several semesters. Because writing assessment
experts hold that it is not possible to prove value-added in fifteen weeks, the trend
in recent years has been toward electronic portfolio assessment. Through
electronic portfolios, writing programs can collect student writing samples from
each year. Value-added assessment is more valid and reliable (and worth the time
and effort) when it compares students’ writing as entering freshmen, rising
juniors, and graduating seniors, for example. In addition, this kind of long-range
assessment is an important reason to appoint a Director of Writing as described
above. (For more information on the use of electronic portfolio assessment at
small liberal arts colleges, see the work of Carol Rutz from Carleton College.)
 We concur with the faculty we spoke to that CLA results are problematic. We
were told that the results show that Juniata students appear to be less fluent (that
is, they write less) than students at peer institutions. However, faculty also
reported that seniors had to be cajoled into taking the test and that they do so
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reluctantly. Thus, the results probably measure the writing abilities of reluctant
writers and as such are not terribly useful. (In fact, at the time this report was
being written, there was a discussion on the SLAC/WPA listerv in which several
WPAs were reporting the exact same issue with CLA – that is, that their college’s
CLA test results were not valid because the writing task was disconnected from
the learning goals and motivation of the test-takers who were cajoled to take a test
in which they had no investment.)
Begin all assessment projects with a research question aimed at program
improvement. Then collect the data and use the findings to tweak your program
goals. In this sense, both small and large scale assessments are useful. Here are
some examples of smaller assessment projects:
o How do CWS teachers interpret the “CWS CORE” goals in practice?
Collect syllabi, writing assignments, and learning goals. Assess the data
and use the information to plan faculty development workshops and/or
revise the CWS CORE statement.
o To paraphrase the CWS Lab Syllabus, do first-year students learn more
about Juniata support systems, become integrated into the college
community, and have a “successful first semester” as a result of CWS lab?
Create focus groups and ask those questions. Look at first-year student
grades versus grades of students before the CWS Lab was in place. Give
students a brief final exam that tests their knowledge of Juniata support
systems. Use the data to revamp the CWS lab curriculum.