Brainstorming some ideas for internship projects for students:
- Large project designed to understand how writing instruction (and student improvement) affects students as they move their careers.
- Placement numbers – how do students do after fyc (does placement matter beyond assisting students in adjusting to college writing?)
- Proficiency exam numbers – how do students in writing for classes they take as they proceed? Both students who failed and those who passed will be important, although getting data will be easier (and more understandable) for those who don’t, because we have a pretty good idea of what goes in English 230, 240, and 323…
- Goal, once we’ve completed these tasks: come up with some way to code fyc essays that will translate to later essays, and help us determine what’s helping students become better writers (this might be impossible b/c of the situational nature of writing and the importance of working with individuals, but the hope is that a better grasp of numbers from a meta perspective will help at least target what we’re doing)
- My guess is that this project will eventually take the form of some XML development – we might want to see if computer science wants to get involved…
- User manuals of many sorts
- Creating your portfolio
- Using e-Portfolios to improve your job prospects
Other notes:
- Part of this process will be understanding what tools we need – for instance, as of now the only way we have of tracking how well students do in subsequent classes is by grade. We’ll need to understand what courses they’ve had to write in, what kind of writing they did, did they well or poorly based upon mechanics or content, etc.
- We’ll need to talk to Edna about getting permission to look at grades and such, and we might need to talk to Leigh about IRB concerns…
- Tools – how do we collect data? What sorts of forms should we use to count, and how do we ensure that we have accurately tracked the numbers?