WAC/WID Resources

Sternglass, Marilyn. Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level . Mahwah , NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.

Long before the CUNY WAC Initiative, a six-year research study conducted by CCNY professor Marilyn Sternglass underscored the role that writing plays in students' learning processes. Her longitudinal study consisted of studnnt interviews, classroom observations, and analysis of formal and informal student texts. The research detailed the complex writing and intellectual development of CCNY students, over time and across disciplines. From her final chapter, she provided the following conclusions:


"If one believes, as I do, that a major function of education is to foster questioning, then the.[research] presented in this study can be seen as evidence that the students developed this ability over time. Many started with the acceptance of 'facts' that were presented to them in their discipline studies. But all were able to move beyond such automatic acceptance to recognize that new insights could be provided that might alter some unexamined assumptions in the fields.

The role of writing in this transformation has been crucial. Repeatedly, students reported that reading alone or listening to lectures alone did not engage them deeply enough for them to remember facts and ideas nor to analyze them. Only through writing, perhaps through the condensation and analysis of classroom notes or through the writing of drafts of papers that required them to integrate theory with evidence, did they achieve the insights that moved them to complex reasoning about the topic under consideration.

Early instruction in composition is critical to fostering critical reading and writing skills, but the expectation that students have become 'finished writers' by the time they complete a freshman sequence or even an advanced composition course must be abandoned. As the writing and conceptual development of the students in this study reveal, over several semesters and even several years, through consistent instructional prodding both in writing and in discipline area courses, students can develop an analytic stance that permits them to understand the significance of ideas in the particular field to the level where they become able to question some of the assumptions in that field.

Another central finding of this study is that instructional approaches in a wide range of disciplines have the ability to use writing to foster critical thinking.(S)tudents knew that they learned more in those courses that required analytical writing, because such writing demanded their questioning of assumptions."

Since Sternglass's book was published, several longitudinal studies have been launched at other universities. See Lee Ann Carroll's description of the University of Pepperdine study, Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers (Southern Illinois UP, 2001) and, for an overview of the entire Harvard University assessment project, Richard Light, Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds (Harvard UP, 2001).