By WIC Team

Are you invested in writing across the curriculum pedagogy, but don’t have time to read the related scholarly articles? Quick WIC provides citations and annotations for articles related to teaching writing across the disciplines. The WIC Team uses the rhetorical precis annotation format to bring you writing pedagogy scholarship in brief.

Creating High-Impact Writing Assignments in WIC Programs

Anderson, Paul et. al. “How to Create High-Impact Writing Assignments that Enhance Learning and Development and Reinvigorate WAC/WID Programs: What Almost 72,000 Undergraduates Taught Us.” Across the Discipline, Vol. 13, Dec. 2016.

In their article “How to Create High-Impact Writing Assignments that Enhance Learning and Development and Reinvigorate WAC/WID Programs: What Almost 72,000 Undergraduates Taught Us,” Paul Anderson, Chris M. Anson, Robert Gonyea, and Charles Paine promote three writing constructs as successful high-impact practices in the post-secondary setting. Using more than 70,000 surveys from a National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Survey, Anderson and his colleagues ran a statistical analysis leading them to the three constructs vital to creating high-impact writing assignments: interactive writing processes, meaning-making writing tasks, and clear writing expectations.  The three constructs were then broken down into specific tasks instructors can do to accomplish each of these three constructs, making the goals accessible and measurable for all instructors in higher education. They argue that implementing these three constructs may help provide consistency within and among university departments and increase retention rates and graduation rates.

Adaptive Transfer of Knowledge in ELL Students

DePalma, Michael-John and Jeffrey Ringer. “Adaptive Transfer, Writing Across the Curriculum, and Second Language Writing: Implications for Research and Teaching” Writing Across the Curriculum: A Critical Source Book, edited by Terry Myers Zawacki and Paul M. Rogers, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012, pp. 43-67.

In “Adaptive Transfer, Writing Across the Curriculum, and Second Language Writing: Implications for Research and Teaching,” DePalma and Ringer reveal the complex adaptive processes English Language Learners (ELLs) must go through to keep up with their native English-speaking peers. The authors argue that scholars have focused on the re-use of learning rather than recognizing that many students rely on adaptation of learned skills to succeed in “unfamiliar” academic situations. They call this process “adaptive transfer”—the writer’s “conscious or intuitive process of applying or reshaping learned writing knowledge in order to negotiate new and potentially unfamiliar writing situations” (46). DePalma and Ringer’s purpose is to point out that multilingual writers must learn to write across disciplines in complex ways, and this requires flexibility.