Abstract

Keeping writing center records is perhaps the director's most dreaded chore, and it is often seen as a negative duty detracting from the more important business of helping tutors and student clients. However, research data that computers now make almost instantly available reveals surprisingly positive results and ways of presenting those results to the university at large. Simply put, record keeping allows writing centers to demonstrate their centrality. At the University of Alaska, in addition to the main writing center located within the English department, a satellite center is operated in rural student services, primarily for native students. After researching her computer records, for instance, one director discovered that her supposition that the center had made only slight advances into the Alaskan native student population, a targeted risk group for retention, was completely false. She had interpreted the relatively low numbers of natives visiting the center as bad news, when, in fact, native students were using the writing center at a much higher percentage rate than the student body as a whole. Record keeping on computers also offers other opportunities for research. Cindy Selfe (1994) and Lester Faigley (1992) have shown that the way students perceive a process, such as composing and interacting on computers, significantly affects their output. Also, tutoring conducted over telephone lines offers an opportunity for researchers to study the tutoring process by comparing final drafts with initial drafts, which are faxed to the writing center from various outlying areas. (TB)

Citation

Blalock, S.E. (1995). Singing the Song of Ourselves: Projecting the Centrality of Writing Centers through Re-searching our Records. Presented at Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Meeting 1995. Retrieved August 9, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/80528/.

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Keywords

• Alaska Natives
• Computer Networks
• Data Interpretation
• higher education
• Recordkeeping
• technology integration
• Tutorial Programs
• Writing Evaluation
• Writing Instruction
• Writing Laboratories
• Writing Research