Social Work Students and Faculty: Testing the Convergence of Perspectives on Student Writing Abilities

ABSTRACT

Students (n = 244, 76% MSSW) and faculty members (n = 40, 36% tenure or tenure track) at a social work program at a large public southern U.S. university were surveyed to assess within- and between-group differences in perspectives on student writing. Faculty members expressed significantly greater concern with student writing than students. Latina/o, African American, female, and undergraduate students all reported more writing challenges compared to their peers. Likewise, full-time faculty members who teach mainly online or had less training in writing instruction reported more challenges than their colleagues. Overall, our findings support the need for writing interventions that acculturate students to the discipline through a more inclusive, culturally competent discourse as well as increased faculty preparation for teaching writing.

Notes

1. Not all adjuncts teach in any given semester, but 50 adjuncts are active on the adjuncts electronic mailing list.

2. We only included undergraduate students who were graduating that semester because these students were most likely to be familiar with writing in social work. Many undergraduate students were declared social work majors, but they may not have taken any courses in the school of social work yet or had only taken one or two.

3. There were no significant differences between the two groups, but among those whose surveys were deleted for too much missing data, a higher percentage reported to be part-time (81.8%) compared to those who completed the majority of the survey questions (53.8%). Moreover, of that 81.8%, 63.6% were graduate students with teaching responsibilities who may have been confused about whether to complete the student or faculty survey because of their dual roles.

4. PhD students were excluded from the statistical significance testing because of the small sample size. In general, though, they reported higher agreement that writing was one of their academic strengths and lower agreement that they experienced difficulties with specific writing tasks compared to MSSW students.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Courtney Cronley

Courtney Cronley is assistant professor and Christopher D. Kilgore is writing resource coordinator at University of Texas at Arlington.

Christopher D. Kilgore

Courtney Cronley is assistant professor and Christopher D. Kilgore is writing resource coordinator at University of Texas at Arlington.