Hidden in plain sight: findings from a survey on the multi-major professional writing course

ABSTRACT

In this article, the authors report on findings from a survey of writing instructors who teach the multimajor professional writing course (MMPW) across diverse institutional contexts. The authors marshal these findings to advance a series of arguments about the situation of the MMPW course in U.S. higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Programmatic research
• survey research

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jessica Bishop-Royse at the Social Science Research Center at DePaul University for her support with survey methods and our summer research assistant, Theresa Bailey, for her work with recruitment and transcription. Additionally, we would like to thank Amy Hornat-Kaval, Rosemary Golini, and Joseph Szpila for helping us user test the survey. Finally, we would like to thank all of the survey respondents for their generosity with their time and willingness to share and we would like to thank the anonymous TCQ reviewers for helping to strengthen our manuscript.

Notes

1. This number is an estimate based on the number of each Carnegie type institutions (doctoral, master’s, baccalaureate, associate’s; 2015 numbers) and the frequency with which survey respondents reported the number of sections of the MMPW course taught each year at their institution (1–10, 11–50, >50). To be conservative, calculations used the middle number in the lower ranges (5 and 30) and the lowest number (51) for the “more than 50” category. The unrounded estimated total for the overall number of sections of the MMPW course taught each year is 43,538.

2. This number is based on the National Census of Writing report (2013) conducted by Swarthmore finding that 81% of the schools in the census reported that they require first-year composition. Because a large majority of students (86%) are enrolled at institutional types that are also the most common locations for the FYC course (doctoral, master’s and associate’s institutions), we did not break this calculation down by institutional type because the order of magnitude of the total number would not have changed. In addition, we did not account for the percentage of students who place out of the course because of grades or testing (such as Advanced Placement (AP) testing) or first year student retention rates. We assumed that there are an estimated 5 million college first-year students (one fourth of the total number of college students for 2015 as reported by Carnegie (2016a)) and we assumed an average of 20 students per section. Given these assumptions, the unrounded estimated total number of sections is 202,500. We assume that this number has meaning only to the order of magnitude of the closest 10,000.

3. The coffee cards were delivered electronically, thus preserving the deidentification of the survey data.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a 2015 Research Initiative Grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.