Recently, I asked several UCWbLers who are not Research Team members: what would you describe as the major projects or goals of the Research Team? I received a few different responses, ranging from “working with spreadsheets and data” to “making infographics and spreading information about The UCWbL.” While yes, all of these things are things that we do on the Research Team (and there are spreadsheets involved!), I also want to talk about some of our other major initiatives, since our work by nature is behind the scenes and is less visible than that of some of the other teams.
For instance, Outreach tables—an explicitly interactive and outward activity—and Workshops conducts physical workshops, which also makes The Writing Center more visible. On the research team, conversely, some of our most significant projects for the year are assessment projects, where we measure and demonstrate progress different UCWbL teams make toward UCWbL goals. I know the word assessment itself carries some negative connotations, especially because our past experiences with assessment probably involved some scary evaluation on a standardized scale. Assessment reminds me of the individual evaluations my dance studio forced me to do in middle school before being certified “ready” to participate in the end-of-year recital. To clarify, this evaluative approach is not the type of assessment we conduct on the research team. The goal of assessment projects, from my experience, is to showcase our success across all sectors of The UCWbL. As a result, we gain specific, data-based information about where we are meeting our objectives and helping the university community. In this blog post, I hope to illuminate our approach to the Outreach team assessment project, which I categorize into four distinct steps:
Step One: Collect Background Information
Collecting background information is one of the most fundamental steps in conducting research and is consistently a part of our weekly meetings. In this particular instance, we had the lovely Jen Finstrom join us and discuss the goals of the Outreach team in line with larger UCWbL goals and how the tabling process works. Our goal in this step, as the Research Team, is to understand the two layers of Outreach goals and UCWbL goals—talk about some meta-goal-setting! Personally, I found this process to be helpful in explaining some of the planning that goes into tabling, since I hadn’t previously been exposed to this. As Jen explained, the Outreach team wanted to emphasize both the accessibly of The UCWbL as well as the upcoming hiring season. This background knowledge was essential to our preparation before actually observing tabling and interpreting our results!
Step Two: Observe Tabling
If you’re a member of the Outreach team (or you just happened to be tabling for the day), you might have noticed some Research Team members awkwardly sitting behind you while you interacted with students during tabling. You might have wondered: what exactly are they doing on their computers and in their notebooks? During tabling, we each took individual notes on trends we observed, using a mix of both direct quotes and indirect observations. We organized these notes separately for each interaction between a tabler and a passerby in order to eventually have consistency across our results. At each tabling observation, we tried to have at least two research team members so we could later compare and interpret our results. From my perspective, the actual observations were particularly interesting because I got to see how UCWbLers apply the core beliefs in everyday interactions with students, which is an important component of spreading awareness and accessibility for The Writing Center.
Step Three: Code our Notes
Step three is where—you guessed it—spreadsheets finally enter the scene! Our focus is to reorganize our information into a normative spreadsheet that will later help us compare conclusions. The coding process takes place individually, since we do not want to introduce any comparison bias at this stage of research. We discussed how exactly to structure this spreadsheet during the “background information” step of the research process based on our own preferences. Our spreadsheet encompassed several categories but was predominantly organized by the different core beliefs. We sorted both direct quotes and indirect interpretations into the segment of the core belief that they best represented.
Step Four: Compare and Interpret Conclusions
During this step, we finally get to collaborate directly with our fellow team members and UCWbL staff. In this particular project, we used a “vetting” process of sorts, not unlike that of the written feedback vetting process, in which we had at least two fellow Research Team members read each other’s spreadsheets and offer each other feedback. During our meetings, we discussed the significant trends we found throughout the assessment and how we thought the core beliefs were well conveyed as a whole by the various tablers. Ultimately, the conclusions are most relevant to the teams themselves, so we always share the information from our assessment with the coordinators of that specific team. In this context, we shared our findings with Outreach Coordinator Jen Finstrom. Jen felt the assessment project not only answered some of the initial questions about tabling and it’s efficacy in reaching the university community, but it also provided new possibilities that could potentially lead to other future assessment avenues (and more spreadsheets!). The circumstances of tabling potentially guide how UCWbLers represent The UCWbL and our values to passers-by. The focus on hiring led to conversations about genre and types of writing, while this year’s t-shirt we gave out for International Writing Centers Week often focused the conversation on the belief that everyone the tablers were talking to was indeed a writer. An overall takeaway Jen voiced is that there is so much to learn about what happens when we leave The Writing Center and take what we believe about The UCWbL out into the university!
Next Steps?
Since we’re all about actionable next steps here at The UCWbL, I want to briefly discuss what takes place after a research assessment project is over. For one thing, the conclusions from assessment projects can influence the future work of teams, because they can say with reasonable confidence what strategies will produce effective outcomes. Moreover, as a member of The Research Team, I’ve learned that assessment is never really “over,” because we are always measuring where we meet our UCWbL goals! This process is especially in line with The UCWbL core values of transparency, reflection, and collaboration. In terms of transparency, the assessment process allows us to understand and openly discuss the implications of our work. Reflection is an ongoing process, which relates directly to The Writing Center’s emphasis on goal-setting. Collaboration is pretty self-explanatory since the assessment projects bring The Research Team together with other teams!
Right now, we’re actually working with the Workshops Team and Writing Fellows coordinators to assess progress on in-text citations with both of their respective student populations. This sort of collaboration is effective in capitalizing on the myriad of different interests and perspectives of various parts of The UCWbL, and I hope to continue doing this work in the future.