Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing

Identity, Process, and Transfer at a Public University

Laura Wilder

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781646426577, 9781646426560
• eBook ISBN: 9781646426584
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education Administration
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing presents the results of a large-scale longitudinal study of college writers that explores the impact of a required first-year writing course with a comparative approach not previously available. Over five years Laura Wilder conducted 143 interviews with, and collected 774 pages of writing from, 58 students, half of whom had taken a new first-year writing course and half who had not. Wilder found that while in many ways the experiences of both groups are comparable—demonstrating how students receive valuable educations in rhetoric and writing from a variety of sources beyond a first-year writing course—students who took the first-year writing course were much more likely to identify as writers. This identification supported students' use of writing in powerfully generative and knowledge-building ways that they carried with them long after the course into other appropriate contexts.
 
In contrast to previous longitudinal studies of college writers undertaken at institutions with high prestige and resources, Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing explores the role of writing at a regional  public university and documents how students' experiences with writing can be highly divergent across the curriculum and unequal across campuses. Additionally, this book includes the voices of students who do not identify as capable writers and have strongly negative emotional reactions to writing and writing instruction and adds empirical support to innovative calls in the field to transform the first-year writing course into one that inspires students to reflectively consider writing itself.
 
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Questioning the Impact of the First-Year Writing Requirement
• 1. “They Write a Lot More Than I Am Writing at My School”: The Role Writing Plays Across Curricula and Lives at an Institution Lacking Privilege
• 2. “If There Was a Class That Could Make Them Confident”: Comparing the Writing Experiences of Students Who Took the First-Year Course to Those of Students Who Did Not
• 3. “In Every Part of Your Writing, You Should Be Inside of It”: The First-Year Course Encouraged a New Mindset Toward Writing for Some (But Not All)
• 4. “You Should Write to Know What You Don’t Know”: Three Case Studies Tracing Affordances and Limits of the First-Year Course
• 5. “Being Able to Write Things Quickly, Easily”: Low-Self-Efficacy Student Writers’ Theories of Writing
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Open-Ended Interview Question Script
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author