Writing Instruction and Assignments in an Honors Curriculum: Perceptions of Effectiveness.

INTRODUCTION Learning to write well is a significant outcome of higher education, as confirmed and illustrated in the Written Communication VALUE Rubric of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Bennett notes that writing well is a singularly important capability, indicating that virtually all higher education programs intend for students to write better when they graduate than when they enrolled. Moskovitz refers to an AAC&U survey of member institutions in which writing topped the list of learning outcomes for all students. Scholars agree that writing and thinking are linked. Oatley and Djikic discuss how writing externalizes thinking by using various media in the processes of manipulating symbols, and Kovac suggests that connections between writing and thinking express the metaphorical interactions between language and thought. Menary notes that the creation and manipulation of written texts is a fundamental component of our cognitive processing, such that writing transforms our cognitive abilities. Thinking about this relationship between writing and thinking in the context of instructional strategies and assignments designed to improve students' critical thinking, we undertook research that began by surveying perceptions of writing competencies before and after taking a writing-intensive, four-course honors curriculum sequence. For the purposes of this research, we coined the term "critical-thinking writing," defined as the ability to construct a thesis, build an argument, support arguments with empirical data, acknowledge alternative positions, synthesize, analyze, and draw conclusions. We distinguished critical-thinking writing from grammatical writing, which includes grammar, spelling, sentence and paragraph structure, and paper organization. We defined "instructional strategies" as the methods used by instructors to foster and critique the written work submitted by students with the goal of bringing about learning outcomes related to critical-thinking writing. The phrase "course assignments" refers to the planned student activities and specific tasks that demonstrate the extent to which students attain the desired learning outcomes intended by the course and instructor. The research presented here grew out of faculty discussions about the relationship between course-related reading, critical thinking, and writing within the context of a land-grant university's honors college curriculum. This interdisciplinary "great books" curriculum is organized chronologically, with the first two courses in the four-course sequence meeting the writing-intensive general education requirement. "Writing-intensive" is defined at this institution as providing students the opportunity to revise at least one of their written course assignments and assigning the majority of the course grade based on the assessment of writing assignments. The last two courses in the sequence also meet the objective of writing outside of the major, so all four of the courses have a writing-intensive component. RESEARCH QUESTIONS The following four research questions were addressed in this study: 1. Do students perceive a change in their critical-thinking writing abilities as a result of their instructional experiences, and if so, what are those changes? 2. Do instructors perceive a change in their students' critical-thinking writing over the course of the instruction, and if so, what are those changes? 3. Are student and instructor perceptions about critical-thinking writing consistent? 4. What classroom strategies and assignments are perceived by faculty and students to influence critical-thinking writing? METHODOLOGY Driving our research were questions linked to perceptions of student writing competency before and after completing the writing-intensive honors course sequence. Given the context of this research, we used a non-experimental, two-group design involving convenience sampling of students and faculty. …