By Vicki Tolar Burton, WIC Director
New research on college writers published in the journal Across the Disciplines has identified a short list of high-impact teaching practices that correlate with students’ academic success and positive college engagement. The practices are:
- Interactive writing processes
- Meaning-making writing tasks
- Clear writing assignments.
The WIC program will unpack these high-impact practices at four WIC spring lunch seminars. At the April 14 lunch, we will introduce the practices in more detail, along with deep approaches to learning that can be applied to any course, including writing-intensive courses. We will also share multi-modal strategies for implementing the practices.
One of the interactive writing processes that supports learning is peer feedback on drafts. On April 21, faculty will learn about feedback available at OSU’s new Undergraduate Writing Studio. (Read more about this in our interview with Studio Coordinator, Dennis Bennett in this issue.) On April 28, Kay Sagmiller, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning will support the practice of using meaning-making writing tasks with an interactive presentation on cognition and learning. The final lunch seminar on May 5 brings us more ideas on interactive writing processes using technology, including Instructional Technology Specialist Tasha Biesinger and others from Information Services. Please sign up for the lunches, read a rhetorical precis of Paul Anderson, et al’s, “How to Create High Impact Writing Assignments,” or read the full article in Across the Disciplines.
Faculty in majors with growing enrollments will want to check out this issue’s article by Dan Smith and Jessica Just on the new WIC model designed by the Department of Food Science and Technology. Smith and Just share both course design and assessment take-aways in this innovative approach to teaching students to write in their major.
Finally, please be sure your unit plans to honor the top undergraduate writer in each major with a WIC Culture of Writing Award spring term. See the information for nominations in this issue.
Happy Spring!
