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After meeting with the Associate Provost and faculty representatives of the Zicklin School of Business and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, we have now settled on some initial research questions to ask of the Writing Diagnostic Data. I share them here in hopes of generating discussion around the assessment and further ideas for analysis.

The first and most general research question is “Does the quality of students’ writing improve over the course of a semester in a CIC?” Related to this question, we are interested in whether improvement occurs across the college or only within specific classes or disciplines. We will also explore whether we see improvement for all students, or only among students who are scoring in the low or middle range to begin with. It will also be worthwhile to see what happens over the course of a semester with students who score high on their initial diagnostics.

Second, we hope to answer the questions of “What happens to students’ who are enrolled in multiple CICs throughout their career at Baruch?” and “Is there consistent improvement among these students from one CIC to the next?” These related questions are of particular importance within the Zicklin School, as students there are required to take 4 CICs before graduation.

We hope to have answers to these questions in the form of a preliminary report by the end of the semester. In the meantime, we are continuing to think about how we can use the data to address issues related to changes in admissions requirements, differences between lower level vs. upper level classes and ESL students vs. native English speakers, and how the outcomes of this assessment may correlate with other academic outcomes, like GPA.

As most readers are very familiar with the data (both its strengths and weaknesses) we welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions regarding these preliminary ideas for analysis as well as other research questions you think are important and would like to see addressed.