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Publishing in Scientific and Engineering Contexts: A Course for Graduate Students Tutorial —Feature by JON A. LEYDENS and BARBARA M. OLDS Abstract—Based on feedback from graduate students, from science and engineering faculty who teach graduate students, and from surveys about the skills graduate students need, the authors have designed and taught a graduate-level course in academic publishing. This article describes the need for the course and the theory behind its design, outlines the course content, and presents assessment data from the first three course iterations. The findings indicate that this course has increased students’ awareness of the role of rhetorical and discourse knowledge as well as their level of confidence in their ability to write and publish professional work. Further, findings from interviews with faculty advisors yield insight into the benefits of the course for students, advisors, disciplinary programs, and cross-curricular initiatives. Index Terms—Academic publishing, engineering graduate students, graduate instruction, science graduate students, teaching of writing, writing pedagogy.
OVER the past several years, faculty participants in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) workshops at Colorado School of Mines (CSM) have been asked what they know about writing that they did not know when they completed their doctoral degrees. When their responses are compiled, faculty are asked to mark separately those items they think undergraduates and graduates should know before completing their respective degrees. Faculty responses indicate that an overwhelming majority of faculty members want their students—and particularly their graduate students—to be better prepared than they were in terms of the written communication skills that augment chances for professional success. Faculty members then discuss which writing abilities they think most graduate students actually possess when they receive a graduate degree. According to most faculty, the abilities students possess depend on several variables, such as their writing ability when they arrive, the quality of advising, the degree to which professors’ and advisors’ knowledge of written communication in the discipline is tacit or explicit, and whether faculty view the process of initiating graduate students into the ways of communicating in a specific discipline as their Manuscript received December 20, 2005; revised June 1, 2006. J. A. Leydens is with the Campus Writing Program, Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401 USA (email:
[email protected]). B. M. Olds is with the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401 USA (email:
[email protected]). IEEE 10.1109/TPC.2006.885863 0361-1434/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
active responsibility or as something that will simply be learned “along the way.” Out of these and other exigencies, we designed and co-taught a seminar for graduate students called Academic Publishing, intended primarily to equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in publishing in the academic arena and, since some of the knowledge is transferable across rhetorical contexts, in the workplace. This paper describes the need for the course; the course goals; our “concept application” instructional approach, including the rhetorical tools and their application; and our assessment of the pilot offering of the course in 2000 and subsequent offerings in 2002 and 2004.
NEED
FOR THE
COURSE
When Albert Einstein completed his dissertation on molecular dimensions at the University of Zürich in 1905, it was 21 pages long and did not cite a single reference [1]. In the last century, much has changed: scientists and engineers today write dissertations that are both longer and draw from a greater wealth of existing research. The complexity inherent in writing modern theses and dissertations was one motivator for this course. Along with some graduate students from the applied sciences, most students enrolled in Academic Publishing hail from engineering disciplines, a reflection of the CSM graduate student body. Of the 38 students who have taken the course in the first four iterations, 32 have come from
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Fig. 1.
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On dissertation writing ([19, p. 187], used with permission of the artist).
engineering disciplines. Learning to write in engineering and applied science academic contexts differs from doing the same in workplace contexts due to different exigencies, genres, contexts, and more. However, some general rhetorical principles apply in both contexts, especially the need for rhetorical awareness of audiences, purposes, occasions, writers, and topics. Hence, this course serves students whether their careers take them to industry or academia by addressing a need for greater rhetorical understanding of scientific and engineering writing. Writing exigencies in publish-or-perish academia may be obvious, but studies on workplace communication consistently underscore the important role writing also plays in the life of practicing engineers. Interviews and surveys of practicing engineers have emphasized the importance of communication and writing skills for success in the workplace [2]–[5]. Research has also indicated a direct correlation between the amount of technical communication instruction in college and career advancement [6]. A review of studies on workplace writing concludes that between 20% and 40% of a typical engineer’s workday is spent writing, a figure that climbs as one moves up the career ladder [7]. In another study, engineers who had been in the workforce for two to three years estimated that they spent approximately 30% of their workday writing, while middle managers estimated 50%–70%, and senior managers estimated over 70%, some as much as 95% [8]. The amount of time these professionals may spend writing in industry or in academia represents a significant financial investment by their employers, who also have a stake in efficient, effective written communication. Based on the results of one survey, a recent report estimates that the cost of remedying writing
deficiencies in employees of major US corporations exceeds $3 billion annually [9]. Such research underscores the need for our course and indirectly for its design, which focuses on developing both specific disciplinary writing abilities and overall communication and rhetorical abilities.
The need for this course also arises from other sources. In the years before offering the course, some graduate students working with tutors in our campus writing center had asked about the possibility of such a course. A few had expressed interest in assistance with their thesis or dissertation as well as in transforming thesis or dissertation research into research articles for publication. In addition to our anecdotal evidence, the results of surveys of faculty in six graduate engineering programs indicate that most engineering faculty believe there is a significant need for writing skills after graduation and upon entering the professional arena. However, the same study found a lack of formal writing requirements in these graduate engineering programs (other than the thesis) that would help students become better writers. As a result, faculty sometimes spend a large amount of time and effort helping write or rewrite the theses or dissertations of their students, a phenomenon satirized in Fig. 1. According to this same study, the amount of assistance needed tends to be greater with nonnative speakers of English [10]. While advisors can edit thesis and dissertation drafts and provide useful advice regarding content and disciplinary discourse, professionals with backgrounds in writing and rhetoric can foster in students greater metacognitive awareness of the writing processes and rhetorical components relevant to their emerging texts.
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SEMINAR GOALS Our efforts to construct such a course were not novel, and two course models in particular helped guide the course development process—a FIPSE-funded project involving faculty and graduate students at Michigan State University [11] and a course developed at Georgia State University [12]. Their ideas helped us shape our course objectives; specifically, the Michigan State project provided or reinforced ideas on both course readings as well as course activities, such as peer writing workshops. The Georgia State University course, in addition to providing content ideas, gave us confidence in the need for and viability of a cross-disciplinary graduate course focused on academic writing. Beyond these influences, our course objectives were also shaped by four aspects of COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE, which are articulated in [13]: • Members of a research community share a “model of knowing” [14]. This model of knowing is embedded in the research methodology that incoming students in graduate programs learn and is encoded in the language that community members use. • A research community extends beyond a student’s graduate school to include researchers at other institutions who use the same methodologies and who ascribe to compatible models of knowing. These researchers constitute an “invisible college” [15] or “thought collective” [16], sharing their work with one another through publications in professional journals and through papers delivered at professional meetings. • Papers and publications constitute a research community’s communicative forum; significant issues are raised, defined, and debated within the communicative forum. In this sense, to publish and to be cited is to enter the community’s discourse. • Graduate students are initiated into the research community through the reading and writing they do, through instruction in research methodology, and through interaction with faculty and with their peers. A significant part of this initiation process is learning how to use appropriate written linguistic conventions for communicating through disciplinary forums. [13, p. 12]
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Inspired by this framework of communicative competence, we designed our course objectives so that by the end of our course students should: • Have a greater understanding of their disciplinary discourse conventions and be able to apply that knowledge to the process of preparing their scholarly work for publication in their fields. The term DISCOURSE CONVENTIONS refers not only to the ways people speak and write but is also connected with the ways in which they think, reason, evaluate, interpret knowledge, and prioritize certain professional values. • Increase their level of confidence in their ability to write for general technical audiences as well as for audiences in their specific discipline. • Increase their understanding of how to self-correct issues in their writing that, when corrected, increase their ability to convey technical concepts effectively to their intended audience. • Understand more about the roles that writer, audience, purpose, topic, and occasion/context play in any rhetorical situation. • Have a greater understanding of how to provide useful suggestions for improvement when conducting peer review.
To meet these objectives, among other activities, we regularly asked students to reflect upon their position on a novice-expert continuum in terms of their writing, as shown in Table I (adapted from [17]). We also discussed the complexities inherent in being initiated into the ways of communicating within an academic discipline or “discourse community” and the many steps and years of apprenticeship between Stages 3 and 4. Throughout the semester, we reminded the students of their ultimate goal to produce “expert, insider writing.” However, we also discussed the possibility of using “insider” knowledge to critique one’s own disciplinary community.
STAGES
IN
TABLE I GAINING EXPERTISE IN DISCIPLINARY DISCOURSE
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INSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH We concur that “it is now generally accepted that to address the needs of graduate students, writing courses must focus on the specific writing purposes that are most relevant to students’ professional needs” [18, p. 210]. Because we wanted students to be able to apply course concepts to theses and dissertations in progress, we restricted enrollment to graduate students who had completed at least one year of their programs. Since our students came from a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, no single faculty member could possibly be an expert in the discourse practices of all the disciplines represented. Also, staffing the course with disciplinary experts from each discipline would be logistically impossible, so we structured the course using an inquiry-based model and brought in a panel of various disciplinary insiders to help highlight both similarities and differences among engineering and science discourse communities. The interaction among students from multiple disciplines comes with challenges that we believe are outweighed by the learning benefits, including an expanded understanding of the research process and discourse community differences and similarities [19]. However, before the inquiry phase began, students were presented with a general set of rhetorical “tools,” concepts that they then applied to their own disciplinary writing contexts. Becoming Familiar With the Rhetorical Tools We took a concept application approach to instruction, which involved teaching certain rhetorical and discourse concepts and then having students apply them to published research and research in progress. During the first 7 weeks of the 16-week course, students were presented with general rhetorical tools with which they could analyze writing in their fields, their own writing, and peers’ writing. Among other topics, students were exposed to ideas on the rhetorical moves in research article introductions [20], features of metadiscourse [21], [22], Toulmin analysis (adapted from [23]), as well as ways of meeting reader expectations for placement of new and given information [24]. Appendix A contains the current list of course readings in Table II, and Appendix B lists the in-class instructor presentations. Also during this phase of the course, we asked students to determine percentages for the assignments, pen an authorial information memo, lead discussions, compose annotated bibliography
entries on the readings, and write journal entries. A list of the eight major assignments appears below: • authorial information memo; • annotated bibliography entry; • five (or more) journal entries; • rhetorical analysis; • work in progress for peer review; • two annotated bibliography entries; • a final written report; • an oral presentation. Since one of our major goals was to help students gain confidence in their writing, we wanted them, their questions, and their writing to be the focal point of the course. For example, on the first day of class, we described all course assignments and asked students to determine what percentage of their final grade each assignment should constitute. Their consensus decision was similar to what we would have chosen, and by asking them to make this important judgment, they began to take ownership of their learning from the first day of class. Because we wanted students to be at ease critiquing their own written work and that of their peers, we also did our best to establish and maintain a comfortable, supportive classroom atmosphere. For the authorial information memo assignment, we asked students to locate one of the top journals in their field, one in which they aspired to publish, and write a one-page memo that included the following: • a photocopy of the “Information for Authors” section outlining documentation format and other information for authors; • a brief explanation of why they chose this journal; • a brief explanation of how this journal’s authorial style was similar to and/or different from the student’s own common style(s) of writing. The students were then expected to follow the selected journal’s style guide in all papers they wrote for the class. When they compared the guidelines from the various journals in class, an interesting discussion ensued about different disciplinary expectations. Some of the students were surprised that there was not a single “right” way to prepare an article for publication and that they saw such significant variation in citation formats, recommended sections, use of first person, and more.
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Students volunteered to lead the discussions on the assigned readings and to write a one-page annotated bibliography entry, which was then posted on the course website (now http://blackboard.mines.edu). These bibliographic entries began with a brief summary of the assigned article followed by a response/evaluation, a list of key words, and a “relevance rating” (relevance to the rhetorical knowledge they were seeking) from 1–10. By preparing annotated bibliography entries and leading discussions, students became the center of the seminar from the outset. The readings were designed to give students both a good theoretical/conceptual background for the course and some practical guidance as budding members of a discourse community. To highlight the nature of science as a social enterprise, readings included discussion of case studies, such as the cold fusion and ulcer research cases [25]. Further, the readings were intended to enable students to better evaluate their own writing and that of others, and the complexity of our discussions clearly ruled out a “cookbook” approach to successful publishing. Students also wrote between five and eight journal entries over the course of the semester on various assigned topics. These were to be at least 200 words long and primarily fostered reflection on the course, their writing, and their current status on the novice-expert continuum; entries were examined in terms of the quality of reflection, not on mechanics or grammar. For example, early and late in the semester we asked students to draw concept maps of the key elements in the process of successful publishing in their disciplines. A CONCEPT MAP is “a visual representation of the structure of [particular] content, but laid out pictorially and nonlinearly” [26, p. 45]. We have been struck by the greatly increased sophistication of their later concept maps and have asked them in their final journal assignment to compare and contrast their early and late maps as a way of reflecting on the evolution of their own rhetorical and discourse knowledge. Through discussion and reflection, the students were able to synthesize many of the concepts they had learned over the course of the semester. For instance, one student in 2004 noted in the final entry that his early map contained only a small portion of the overall writing process The cognitive processes involved in writing are omitted entirely. There is no mention of the use of scientific rhetoric or the importance of
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meeting readers’ expectations when writing. The critical role that peer reviews play in the writing process is missing too By contrast, he thought his later map accentuated these elements. Putting the Tools to Use Students applied the aforementioned tools to a published sample, to their own writing, and to peers’ writing through peer review sessions. First, students used some of the rhetorical tools presented in the initial part of the course to write a rhetorical analysis of a published article in their field, preferably an article from a journal in which they would like to publish. Specifically, students were asked to think of their audience as other graduate students within their discipline who want to know whether specific textual features (such as text connectives and code glosses), rhetorical moves (such as establishing a research gap and showing how the study fills it), or other relevant features improved or detracted from a reader’s understanding of the technical content, either through their presence or their absence. From this analysis, students were asked to draw qualified and preliminary conclusions about the expectations of readers of this article, journal, and (even more cautiously) field. In addition, because of the value of viewing authentic disciplinary genres, each student offered at least one work in progress for a peer review session. Classmates identified strengths and offered suggestions for improvement, a process that frequently led to discussions of how to apply the tools as well as how deeply embedded certain discourse practices are within particular disciplines or subdisciplines. Intriguingly, discussions in these peer review sessions underscored how seemingly disparate issues, such as audience, usage, purpose, punctuation, and disciplinary/subdisciplinary conventions, are often tightly interrelated (for more on this phenomenon, see [27]). Discussions also reinforced the interrelated factors influencing disciplinary writing, as noted in Fig. 2 and discussed more below. The texts students brought to in-class peer review sessions ranged from sponsor reports and literature review chapters to research articles and research funding proposals. At the end of class, each reviewer would also give the writer an edited copy of his or her document, and students commented that they found this oral and written feedback from peers and the instructors extremely useful.
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Mutually shaping and interrelated factors that influence disciplinary writing.
Finally, students inquired into the discourse practices of their disciplines by researching relevant articles on writing for publication within their field and by interviewing select faculty and industry representatives about the nature of a student-selected genre of disciplinary writing. On two of those articles, we asked students to write annotated bibliography entries for posting on the course website. During this inquiry phase, a panel of disciplinary insiders—journal editors from several of the fields students were seeking to publish in—came to class to address questions students had about disciplinary writing and academic publishing. From these articles and interviews, students constructed a final report on disciplinary or subdisciplinary writing genre issues of interest to them and presented their findings to the class orally. These oral presentations and their ensuing question and answer sessions helped us identify more overlaps and differences in writing in the represented disciplines.
Collectively from the in-class discussions and assignments emerged a clearer sense of the various factors that shape disciplinary writing, some of which are noted in Fig. 2. Students’ growing awareness of the complex influences on disciplinary writing was evident in our discussions, the final papers, and the concept maps, all of which moved beyond an emphasis on content knowledge to also include disciplinary inquiry methods, epistemologies, communicative norms, and/or habits of mind, elements that can shape each other and disciplinary writing in complex ways.
ASSESSMENT We solicited and received a great deal of feedback on the course, both formative and summative. Formative feedback was obtained almost continuously in the form of anonymous and open student comments about the readings, the assignments, and the course organization. For
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example, students in the first course iteration in 2000 thought most of the readings were useful, but they were anxious to apply their newly acquired “toolkit.” Hence, in all subsequent course offerings, we have alternated discussion of the rhetorical concepts with opportunities to apply them, such as through rhetorical analysis and peer review. Summative feedback came in three main forms. First, we asked students to complete the standard school-wide evaluation of faculty required in every course. In the first iteration in 2000, the 8 students rated the course overall as either above average (25%) or excellent (75%), and when asked whether the course met their educational and professional needs, 12% agreed and 88% strongly agreed. In 2002, the 5 students rated the course overall as above average (20%) or excellent (80%), and when asked more specifically whether they had learned to write more effectively because of the course, 40% agreed and 60% strongly agreed. In 2004, one of the 11 students rated the course overall as average, while the rest rated it above average (36%) or excellent (55%). When asked whether they had learned to write more effectively because of the course, the 2004 students either agreed (55%) or strongly agreed (45%). Collectively, this feedback suggested that students regarded the course overall and their learning gains quite positively. We also held our own feedback session on the last day of the semester in which students evaluated the course readings and assignments using a survey we developed. Through these surveys and the contrasts between their pre- and post tests (the early and later concept maps), students demonstrated a heightened awareness of the roles writer, topic, audience, purpose, and occasion play in the production of texts. This augmented rhetorical awareness is particularly important in light of research that indicates that many engineering students in particular see text production as largely arhetorical [28], [29]. Among the other comments, students said that they also gained experience, confidence, and knowledge and that the class tied together theory and practice in useful ways. Finally, a year after the 2004 offering, we conducted interviews with those students’ graduate advisors. From an in-class student survey in 2004, we learned that most students had heard about the course from their advisors, so in the interviews we asked advisors to comment on their advisees’ writing (and overall academic) progress since
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taking the course. Prior to each interview, all advisors signed approved informed consent forms for human subjects research, and we audio taped all interviews, which lasted 35–60 minutes. The interview questions appear in Appendix C. To analyze the interview data, we loosely followed the guidelines for constant comparative analysis, a three-step process that allows for the formulation of initial categories (open coding), reassembling of these categories (axial coding), and integration and synthesis of the reassembled categories (selective coding) into a coherent overall message [30]. Among other questions, we asked these advisors to rate advisees’ writing abilities when they entered their graduate programs, while currently in the program, or upon program completion; on a 1–10 scale, where a score of 10 represents an excellent writer and one a very weak writer, the average change in one year’s time was two points. This was a greater increase than students who had not taken Academic Publishing; as one advisor noted regarding his advisee, “The majority [of students] show some [writing] improvement over the four-year Ph.D. [program], probably about the same level that [my advisee] has shown in a period of one year.” Another advisor indicated that his advisee showed dramatic improvement after the course, in part because the student’s writing was quite weak at the outset [Before taking the course], had [my advisee] sent out a report to some external group or agency with my name on it, I would have been embarrassed for his work to go out the door. Afterwards, I would have been okay with it, maybe not proud, but comfortable. Many advisors also underscored the change in students’ attitudes regarding the importance of publishing for their careers. One advisor reported that shortly after taking the course, his advisee, without any advisor prompting, wrote and submitted for publication an article from his MS thesis, which had previously sat on a shelf for over two years. Another advisor noted that when graduate students are more effective and confident writers, their work has a greater chance of receiving both exposure and funding. If a student can write well with minimal editing from an advisor, he added, that student is at an advantage because the document belongs more to him or her than to the advisor.
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Several advisors also acknowledged that in addition to the Academic Publishing course, multiple other factors served as potential contributors to writing improvement. For instance, several advisees benefit from a supportive disciplinary community; these students write two reports a year for industry sponsors and give oral presentations for sponsors, peers, and faculty, who collectively constitute a valuable source of feedback. Also, most students were writing more in the last year than at the outset of their graduate programs, and more writing practice often leads to greater writing improvement. Some advisors also noted writing improvement stemming from student visits to the campus writing center. Three unexpected and noteworthy themes also emerged from the interviews: mentoring, second language, and cross-curricular issues. Mentoring Advisors The advisor-advisee relationship involves varying degrees of mentoring, and some advisors described a kind of master-apprentice relationship. One advisor was familiar with his advisee’s undergraduate written work, and when the student asked to be his graduate advisee, the advisor stipulated that graduate-level work would require addressing any professional deficiencies, and in this case that included writing. According to that advisor, his advisee had never considered writing a professional engineering competency before and subsequently worked very hard to improve. Another advisor said that he was passing down a tradition of excellence in scientific writing that started with his own post-doctorate advisor, who was a masterful writer and had helped him improve his own writing significantly. A third advisor had noticed a team-mentoring phenomenon involving advisors and sponsors: graduate students’ writing consistently seemed to improve after (often blunt) feedback from industry sponsors who implicitly or explicitly reinforce specific criteria that distinguish novice from expert writers. Second Language Issues In speaking about their roles as advisor-mentors, many advisors underscored the additional time commitment and complexities associated with working with advisees who are nonnative speakers (NNS) and writers of English. Estimates of the difference in time spent working with an NNS student versus a native speaker (NS) and writer of English varied; one advisor indicated that she typically spends 50% more time with her NNS advisees, while another said he spends two or three times as
much time with NNS advisees. A third advisor who has had many NNS advisees said he spends less time than in the past because he now believes that providing non-comprehensive feedback on NNS students’ thesis and dissertation drafts gives future employers a more accurate assessment of students’ actual writing abilities. Advisors also noted complexities unique to working with NNS advisees. For instance, one advisor noted occasional difficulties in determining when a student is having a problem with the language or when the problem stems from a technical content issue. The advisor who said he spends two or three times more time with his NNS advisees’ writing lamented that time spent clearing the way to get to the science leaves “less time to spend on the science [itself].” A Cross-Curricular Issue Finally, a few advisors indicated that our questions had spurred reflection on gaps in WAC initiatives. One advisor said that faculty in her discipline could improve in teaching discipline-specific writing; “we expect students to write well, but we do not train them to do so,” she noted. Another advisor stated that when students graduate from our programs as poor writers, this reflects poorly on our program and institution. In the case of undergraduates, this advisor thinks they sometimes “slip through the cracks” in two ways: by letting teammates do the writing on team projects and by receiving feedback exclusively on the content of their writing. When the latter occurs, students do not recognize a writing deficiency and do not seek to improve. The last two years of the curriculum may benefit from a course in which they get more feedback on the quality (as opposed to just the content) of their writing. When asked what comments advisors would like to make regarding the course in general, they universally encouraged us to continue teaching the course. Overall, the student and advisor responses to this course help to explain increasing interest. Unlike the 2000 and 2002 offerings, the course in 2004 initially filled to capacity (15 students), and some students were placed on a wait list. For reasons unrelated to the course, 4 students in 2004 later had to drop the course, so we had 11 students. After we received several queries in the early spring of 2005 regarding the possibility of running the course in fall 2005, we offered a section, which also filled to capacity. We now plan on offering the course annually. The course has recently received a permanent course number and thus has become a mainstay in our institution’s graduate curriculum.
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LESSONS LEARNED As a result of the formative and summative feedback and our own teaching reflections, we have learned the following lessons about augmenting student learning in Academic Publishing: (1) Revise the reading list. Student feedback and our own assessment of the readings have led us to keep some course readings (introducing the relevance of some more clearly), eliminate a few, convert some into instructor presentations (see Appendix B), and add a few. (2) Intersperse concepts and application. As noted above, we revised the course so rhetorical concepts (via readings and presentations) alternated over the course of the semester with peer review and other opportunities for application. (3) Empower the students. Students responded favorably to the collegial atmosphere and the degree of ownership they had over the way the course was organized and conducted. As a result, attendance was always high and all assignments were completed. The course website was also a source of pride since much of the students’ work over the course of the semester was published on it, including their final reports. (4) Continue to monitor the needs of NNS and NS students. Given a sufficient number of NNS students, we could create a separate section for NS students, as each group has different specific needs. However, the needs for general rhetorical and metacognitive knowledge regarding disciplinary writing apply to both types of students. Further, not separating NNS and NS students may more accurately reflect the (often highly collaborative) academic and other workplace environments that our students will enter. At the same time, we see the benefits of courses designed specifically for NNS students, such as [31]. As a result, we have taken steps to address NNS issues—for instance, having students keep a log on areas for improvement, be those grammatical, rhetorical, technical, or otherwise. (5) Focus on student work. Students appreciated having their own writing as the focal point of the class and learning from each other’s works in progress. Working with their own research allowed students to see the relevance
(6)
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of rhetorical and discourse concepts as applied to a high-stakes document. Work with engineering and science faculty to “sell” the course. Since we knew advisors valued the course, we have asked them to recommend the course to advisees, and partly because of this, the course has filled to capacity in the last two offerings. At this point, we hope word-of-mouth among students and between students and advisors will be our best advertising.
One thread runs through each of the six lessons above: that graduate writing courses succeed and improve when they address clear student needs and are pilot tested on local terrain, responsive to the unique elements within each institutional context. Some of the elements of our course may generalize across contexts, but most likely instructors of graduate writing courses will find themselves, as we did, tailoring instruction to distinctive sets of objectives and needs. Our course, for example, resembles yet departs from the two course models we noted above and does so in ways signified in our course revisions since the first course iteration [11], [12]. Further, instructors will teach to diverse audiences who can differ greatly even within the same categories; not all NNS students have the same needs, nor do NS, engineering, or applied science students. Hence, class sizes of 15 or fewer tend to allow instructors to better adapt to complex and varied student needs. Given their backgrounds in rhetoric, writing instructors are uniquely positioned to augment the rhetorical understandings of science and engineering students. As the phenomenon of writing initiatives in graduate science and engineering programs evolves, we will learn much from each other through published scholarship and conferences. Future research should further explore graduate writing course features that are generalizable or institution-specific, and the advantages and disadvantages of integrating or separating NNS and NS students, students from multiple disciplines, and students heading for academic and industry careers. Research that accentuates both distinctions and overlaps among academic and workplace writing exigencies would also benefit instructors of graduate writing courses. Of significant benefit would be longitudinal research that tracks students who do and do not take graduate writing courses to better understand potential long-term benefits.
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APPENDIX A READINGS
FOR THE
TABLE II ACADEMIC PUBLISHING SEMINAR (IN
THE
ORDER ASSIGNED)
APPENDIX B INSTRUCTOR PRESENTATIONS FOR THE ACADEMIC PUBLISHING SEMINAR (LISTED IN THE ORDER PRESENTED)
APPENDIX C ACADEMIC PUBLISHING STUDY, ADVISOR INTERVIEWS
(1)
(2)
(2) (3) (4) (5)
(6)
The Rhetorical Situation (Materials adapted from Purdue University’s Online Writing Center) The Article Pre-Submission Process (based on [32]) The CARS Approach (based on [20]) Conference Abstracts and Scientific Papers (based on [25]) A Rhetorical Analysis of NSF’s Request for Proposals (based on personal communication from S. B. Katz) Research Software (based on authors’ own research experience using EndNote)
(1)
(3)
(4)
What changes, if any, have you/did you notice in the writing skills of [advisee] during his/her graduate program? Compared with other students in the same graduate program, did (has) this advisee improve(d) more or less in his or her disciplinary writing skills over the course of his or her graduate degree program? (Define disciplinary writing.) What factors may have influenced, either positively or negatively, those changes in the advisee’s writing skills during his/her graduate program? [Depending on responses to 2]. Discuss whether evidence exists that the advisee’s involvement in Academic Publishing in the fall
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of 2002/2004 contributed to his/her writing improvement. If so, what evidence? How did he/she improve? (5) Compared with other graduate students in the same graduate program, (5a) is the advisee making good progress toward completing his or her degree in a timely manner? (5b) Or, did the advisee complete his/her degree in a timely manner? (6) Has the students’ writing improvement made your job as an advisor easier in any way? If so, how? Any other benefits for faculty when advisees take this course? (7) On a scale of 1–10, where 10 is for an excellent writer, one for a very weak writer, where would you place this advisee when he or she entered the current degree program? Placement for peers entering the same program? (8) On the same 1–10 scale, where would you place this advisee (a) now or (b) when he or she finished the degree program? For peers in the same amount of time or exiting the same program? (9) Are there any other comments you would like to make regarding the writing improvement of this advisee? (10) Are there any other comments you would like to make regarding the AP course?
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This paper is a substantial revision of “A Graduate Course on Academic Publishing,” a paper presented at the 31st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. We would like to thank the students and advisors who have lent their time and insights to improving this course.
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Jon A. Leydens has served as Writing Program Administrator in the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies at Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, since 1997. Beyond writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines, his research interests include teaching, learning, and assessment issues. Besides Academic Publishing, he also teaches undergraduate courses in technical writing and service learning.
Barbara M. Olds is Professor of Liberal Arts in International Studies and Associate Vice President for Educational Innovation at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), Golden, CO. She recently returned to CSM after three years as a Division Director in the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Her research centers on the assessment of undergraduate engineering student learning.
