Low-Stakes Writing as a High-Impact Education Practice in MBA Classes

Studies examining writing as a High-Impact Education Practice (HIP) have focused primarily on writing in terms of major project assignments, thus directing attention away from the promising high impacts that low-stakes writing (LSW) assignments have on student learning. This study piloted assigning LSW in two MBA classes to test the extent to which LSW assignments align with Anderson et al.'s (2016) study on high-impact writing assignments, and further, how accessible and beneficial LSW assignments are for non-WAC faculty and their curricula. Interview data from this study shows encouraging potential for WAC expansion and recruitment, and student survey data shows a promising relationship between LSW and the HIPs. This study ultimately shows low-stakes writing to function as a HIP, recruitment tool, and resource for correcting misconceptions about assigning writing. At the end of a seven-week semester, a business professor sits at his desk, careful not to knock over stacks of paper that have been systematically piled into an organized mess. He has submitted final grades, and finally has time to be interviewed about his first time assigning low-stakes writing (LSW) in his MBA leadership courses. The inevitable technical difficulties of video chatting gave me time to recount the less-than-positive assumptions the professor (who I'll refer to as Lee) had initially shared with me about assigning writing. When Lee first agreed to participate in my case study, he was hesitant about assigning LSW tasks because he thought they “felt a little bit too much like just traditional homework.” This idea of “traditional homework” having only a small impact on student learning is common, and Lee projected that in our interview when he talked about his expectations for students' tacit knowledge: He associated the LSW prompts I'd designed – from the course textbook – with “conversational knowledge” that he expected his students to already have. Over the next 45 minutes, though, I learned that these small writing tasks had completely shifted Lee's assumptions about the impact that writing can have in a non-writing classroom. I would argue that Lee demonstrated irreversible and transformative change in the context of Meyer and Land's (2003) formative theory on threshold concepts. These alternative experiences of labor show that while an increase of time could be spent reading student work in preparation for class, a significant decrease in time was spent probing students to engage in discussion during class. Bridging student labor to instructor labor, writing studies scholars understand that traditional low-stakes writing supports the goals of AAC&U's High-Impact Education Practices [HIPs] (Kuh, 2008) and that practitioners of both writing and other disciplines often assign various forms of minor writing tasks throughout the semester to supplement major projects and achieve writing requirements. Furthermore, relying solely on major projects to engage students in