Assessment of the WAC @ City Program

City College New York
Writing Fellows/WAC Program
Report on Architecture Students' Perspectives 

Submitted by: Kathleen Nolan

The following report delineates students' views on 1) their experiences as developing writers, 2) experiences with writing instruction and, 3) the (semester long) interventions made by writing fellows in their architecture courses during the 2004-2005 academic year. The findings are based on two sets of interviews done with students in two architecture courses (ARCHI and ARCHII). Five students in ARCHI and nine students in ARCHII were interviewed.

Assignments

A. Writing activities and assignments need to be well integrated into course content. Students prefer assignment/activities that emphasize the importance of concepts, not writing skills.

According to the interview data, the second intervention (ARCHII) appears to have been more successful than the first in terms of integrating assignments into the course content. For example, when asked how course assignments could have been improved to be more helpful for students, student I1 said, "I think the first obvious one would be to synchronize the material with the assignments." (I1) And later the students added, "Well, I just want the assignments to be more relevant to what we were doing." (I1) These kinds of comments appeared repeatedly throughout both students' interviews.

A student from ARCHII made this comment when asked to describe effective assignments: "I think it's really important for them to be coupled with the lectures, which was done to some extent." (II1)

Students in ARCH overwhelmingly felt they benefited from two assignments that brought them into "the field" (a museum trip and a trip to a building they were to analyze). One reason these assignments were a success, according to the students, was because the writing tasks were driven by the content. One student, for example, had this to say: GET QUOTE

B. Assignments and assessments should be aligned (i.e. assignments should help students learn the concepts/content and build the skills that they will be tested/graded on.)

Similarly, students feel they get more out of a course when they are assessed on concepts and material they learned through the assignments. One student from ARCHI complained that, "What we were actually tested on. wasn't really based on the assignments that we did." (I2) And the other student from that class alluded to the lack of alignment between assignments and assessment tools when (s)he said, "Like I could have missed every single class up until the midterm and I still would have gotten an A on the midterm like I did." (I1)

C. Students find guides to writing assignments helpful. But overly structured assignments are experienced by some students as limiting or constraining.

Students in both courses expressed how a set of written guidelines for assignments can be helpful. However, guidelines that have too many questions or too much structure can be limiting. In the case of ARCHI, students were searching for more structure. One student when describing the difficulty (s)he had doing an assignment said, ".if there was some structure. If there was some sort of guidelines, like, how to critique something. Then that would have been very helpful. Instead of just saying, okay, write to the owner of the company." (I1)

The other student in that class said, ".I think they should be more specific." (WF: "Like more guidelines?") "Yes, basically." (I2)

Students in ARCHII had a different experience. They had been given a detailed set of guidelines before going "into the field". These guidelines were meant to help students develop their observational and analytical skills. The guidelines were presented as a kind of worksheet on which students answered questions and drew pictures. When commenting on the worksheets, one student remarked , ".they helped to guide what it was that I was supposed to be looking at, which was helpful. Probably the most helpful." (II1)

However, most of the students who were interviewed had mixed feeling about the worksheets/guidelines. One student, for example, said, "A lot of questions were actually helpful in terms of thinking about the buildings or the context of the, so yeah I think they were really helpful." But later on the student goes on to say, "The writing was, I think it was too specific, and most of the students knew what they have to answer, and I think it could have been a bit more creative in terms of the students, if the questions were a little more.. Could have been longer." (II2)

These students had very similar comments. II1 said, ". there wasn't a lot of freedom in there as far as what we were supposed to be writing about." (II1)

II2: ". it would be maybe better if it was asking us more to think critically and ask us to write more about what we think." (II2)

And II5 put it this way, ".it did not require too much thinking or too much originality from the students. they give you a box and you have to write what belongs in the box." (II5)

So when students are given too much structure, they tend to view assignments as limiting their opportunities to be creative and critical. These comments suggest that professors and writing fellows need to find a good balance so that they can illuminate or break down the process for students without reducing assignments to mere step by step fill-in-the-answer worksheets. Student II4 understood this dilemma. On the matter of providing students with guidelines or not, (s)he states, ".one of them is not better than the other because if they give the question, you're going to be like why did you give me all these questions? And if they don't give questions, you're going to be like what am I supposed to do?" (II4)

D. Students can benefit from rubrics or other means of knowing how their professors will grade assignments. In other words, they believe they can do better if they know what the professor's specific expectations are. 

Only one student expressed this idea explicitly. (S)he complained that, ".the criteria for grading was never mentioned, never discussed. That means I really have no idea how he grades these, you know?" (I1)  

E. Students find "scaffolded" assignments helpful (a series of assignments that build on each other or become progressively more complex).

When asked what (s)he liked about the assignments, student I2 remarked , ". the assignments were good because they were like a progression of what we were writing about. Like first it was just, you're writing to a friend, and at the end it was writing to a client, so that was good." (I2) And when asked about the two field visits (to observe a building interior in a museum exhibit and an actual building), a student from the other class said, "Yeah, like from the first one I already know how, like what should I look for, before I answer those questions." (II2) 

In-class writing/collaborative work 

A. In-class writing activities (workshops) should be content rich.  

Statements from these interviews suggested that students prefer having an explicit focus on course content rather than on what they view as skills-based writing instruction. The following statements from students in ARCHII were typical. They are referring to a workshop conducted by writing fellows that focused on writing an effective paragraph. Student II1 complained that, ".an entire class was devoted to, you know, how to create a proper paragraph, and sentence structure. and I kind of felt in some ways that it was detracting from the lectures." (II1) Moreover, student II6 noted that focusing on ". things that we have already been taught before this class." (II6) was not a good use of time.

This suggests that writing fellows should try to shift the focus of these kinds of workshops so that students gain practice in organizing and developing their writing yet, at the same time, feel challenged by having to grapple with course content.

B. The most effective kinds of collaborative writing activities: 1) provide students opportunities to brainstorm collaboratively in order to deepen their understanding of the assignment/material and get ideas for writing, 2) allow students to produce their own writing (not one collective piece of writing), 3) and offer opportunities for feedback. 

The common themes in the interviews in terms of collaborative writing activities were collaboration during the brainstorming and feedback stages along with ample time for individual students to write. In terms of brainstorming, one student expressed its benefits this way, ".you got to bounce ideas off of them because they would see things that you didn't see. I though he used bronze over here and he said 'no, it's actually glass..' When you get to talk to them it sort of enhances the overall vision." (II5) In this example, the student suggests that (s)he learned something content related from one of her/his classmates.

For ARCHII, Student II8 explains how group discussion can help to clarify comments made by the professor. II8 said, ".we had a group discussion. That was very beneficial to me because I didn't understand all the points that she was making." (II8)

II2 commented , ". discussing it with other people obviously, I learned about what other people thought and wrote about. and I was able to discuss. so it was definitely helpful." (II2)

But most of the students interviewed from ARCHII did not feel that it was helpful when they were asked to collaborate during the drafting phase of one of the writing activities. One student stated, "I really feel that if you want to get a cohesive paragraph to write it individually." (II6)

Another student compared the first activity (in which the students had to draft collaboratively) to the second (where they had time to draft individually). This student said, "..so I think that the second assignment. we got into groups but the we had to write our own essay. I think that was much more helpful.. [You] put whatever you have in your mind on paper instead of everyone like six or seven people trying to write one [paragraph]." (II8)

Student II2 implies that (s)he did not gain much from the group writing activity. (S)he said, "Because like, in the group I tried. I just said my point of view and the others say their point of view and somebody generated a paragraph, and that's it." (II2)

And student II4 sums up this issue of collaborative activities this way, ". working on a project is one thing, when you have to build stuff and exchange ideas, but working on a writing assignment as a group is another thing because you know you have your writing style, but maybe I tend to write more eloquently." (II4) (S)he adds, "Writing together doesn't happen. Exchanging ideas to write for yourself is another thing." (II4)
 

Previous Experiences in writing courses 

There was no consistency in responses to questions about previous courses. Some students identified courses in English or English composition as the most helpful. Other students, however, mentioned courses they had taking in other discipline areas. Students gave a variety of reasons why these previous course were helpful.

One student who thought a particular philosophy course was helpful in developing writing skill pointed to the relationship between developing one's writing and thinking through an argument or philosophical position. This student said, "I think it's very deep to understand philosophy, so after the professor talks about how other famous people, they generate the points of how they look at this world. sometimes you fell you really agree with them, and then you start to write." (II1)

Another student spoke about a history course where the teacher was very strict (a lot of attention was placed on the quality of the students' writing). This student also stated that the course entailed a lot of writing.

Students who mentioned English or composition courses when asked this question, gave similar reasons. When asked specifically about what they gained from their English courses, in terms of writing development, one student focused on how a course offered at a community college had helped her/him learn the structure of an academic piece of writing. The student said, "Well, you learn format, how to write, how to generate the essay, like the first paragraph has to specify the main points..." Another student's comments, like the student who spoke about the World Humanities course, suggested that her/his English course was helpful because it was more demanding. The student compares it to an ESL course. S/he says, "I think the English that I took was more helpful that all the ESL classes that I took...because I'm an honors student, and the English was for the honors, and I think the level was higher and they were more demanding..." Yet, still another student when asked if a previous English course had helped his/her writing development. The student simply said, "Uh, not really."

In sum, students, in general, felt they benefited (in terms of their writing development) from courses where they did a lot of writing, received explicit feedback from the instructor on their writing, and were able to use writing to develop ideas and think critically. Two other themes identified in the data were:

Students overwhelmingly appreciate site visits (experiential, on "hands-on", learning opportunities.

Most students demonstrate a good understanding of why writing is important to their profession.