Background
The UNE Student Academic Success Center Syllabus promises students that they will practice one or more of the following skills in Writing Support Sessions.
- Decode an assignment’s purpose and parameters.
- Identify and practice the different stages/ modes of the writing process, including revision, proofreading, and editing.
- Draft basic essay/paper structures with elements that support a focused, insightful thesis statement.
- Choose appropriate paragraph structures to clearly and concisely develop ideas; use transitions to show relationships between concepts.
- Align tone (formality and word choice) with writing purpose and audience.
- Engage with texts through synthesizing, analyzing, and/or evaluating content as needed to accomplish an assignment’s purpose.
- Support assertions with specific, relevant, and correctly cited evidence/examples.
- Summarize, paraphrase, and integrate source material effectively, ethically, and in conversation with their own thinking/insights.
- Recognize the recursive nature of writing by adjusting strategies to improve the focus, development, and organization of ideas.
In order to assess the degree to which this promise was kept in Biddeford Campus, Portland Campus, and UNE Online writing support sessions and in SAS 011 Writing Lab, the professional writing support team piloted the use of a “Writing Support Activiites Log Form” to track what happened in sessions.
Analysis of the data resulted in useful findings. Reports on the Fall 2022 data for BC Writing Support and SAS 011 Writing Lab can be found at this link.
As a result, in Spring 2023, we are extending the practice of tracking activities in SASC writing support sessions to those conducted by peer writing consultants. We believe doing so will provide a more robust portrait of what happens in writing support sessions, and – through the metacognitive impact of logging data – expand and improve the range of activities used in writing support sessions conducted by peer writing consultants.
In the future, senior peer writing consultants working on a CRLA Level 3 certification may be invited to participate in the analysis of the data.
Learning Outcomes
After completing this training, Biddeford Campus peer writing consultants will be able to:
- Locate the Writing Support Activities Log Form (link for Spring 2024 form)
- Understand the meaning of descriptions of the activities listed on the form and map them to activities they use in their own sessions
- Know how to complete the form
- Locate resources to support the evolution of their writing support practices and expand the range of activities they use in writing support sessions
- Active Reading
- Getting Started on a Paper (includes planning, prompt analysis, idea-generation, and pre-writing strategies)
- Drafting (includes paragraph structures like TRIAC and Barclays)
- Giving and Receiving Feedback
- Revising
- Finalizing Papers (includes editing and polishing)
- Sentence Construction & Grammar
