Greetings colleagues,
My name is Jonathan Marine, and I am a PhD Candidate in the Writing and Rhetoric department at George Mason University. I’m writing to ask for your participation in a research study that seeks to build our understanding of writing engagement and provide composition instructors with actionable formative feedback with which to optimize their curriculum and instruction using the Writing Engagement Scale. The WES is a 16-item survey which asks students to reflect on their engagement with writing (for detailed information about the WES, please see a recently published article).
The goal of this project is to validate the WES as a useful tool for instructors and students at the college level and gather evidence to help differentiate between two often conflated constructs: writing motivation and writing engagement. The project has three phases.
· In the first stage, teachers will distribute a Writing Motivation Survey to students as early in the semester as possible. This previously validated scale was developed in 2016 by a research team that included Steve Graham and asks students to reflect on their motivation to write. This survey will provide additional validity evidence and serve as a way of testing for the differences between motivation and engagement, which is an important part of this study. The Writing Motivation Survey will take approximately 15 minutes.
· In the second stage, teachers will distribute the WES to students in their composition classes after the midpoint of the semester and after a major writing assignment. The WES will take approximately 5 minutes for students to complete.
· In the final stage of the project, teachers will receive an email with the results of the WES at both the whole class and individual student levels. Teachers will be asked to take a seven question survey which asks them to reflect on how they interpret the results and how it might impact their teaching. The teacher survey will take approximately 15-20 minutes.
Overall, your participation in this project should take less than an hour. If you are interested in participating, please reply to me directly at jmarine.
If you have any questions about the research process, you can feel free to reach out to me at jmarine. You may also contact my supervising professor, Dr. Douglas Eyman, at deyman. This study is IRB-approved at George Mason University (IRBNet ID 2137710-1).
Regards,
Jonathan Marine