A Framework for Analyzing Features of Writing Curriculum in Studies of Student Writing Achievement

Abstract

• Background: Researchers interested in quantitative measures of student “success” in writing cannot control completely for contextual factors which are local and site-based (i.e., in context of a specific instructor’s writing classroom at a specific institution). (In)ability to control for curriculum in studies of student writing achievement complicates interpretation of features measured in student writing. This article demonstrates how identifying and analyzing features of writing curriculum can provide dimensions of local context not captured in analysis of student-generated texts alone. Using a dataset of 48 curricular texts collected from 21 instructors teaching in five disciplines across six four-year public universities in the United States, this article: 1) presents a set of curriculum scoring rubrics developed through qualitative analysis, 2) describes a protocol for training raters to use the rubrics to score curricular texts to achieve rater agreement and generate quantitative data, and 3) explores how this framework