Understanding Writing Course Outcomes

The LCC Outcomes for First-Year Composition are based on the recommendations crafted by the Oregon Writing and English Advisory Committee (OWEAC). The statement describes the knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors/attitudes that a student should demonstrate in and across the general education writing sequence that satisfies Oregon’s Associated Arts of Transfer Degree and, at the community college level, fulfills degree, program, and certificate requirements.

The outcomes are based on two key documents created by the Writing Program Administrators: The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (2014), and The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2010); they also reflect the discussion of information literacy that is articulated in the Association of College and Research Libraries' Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016).

Unlike our source documents, which describe the knowledge, skills, behaviors/attitudes, and abilities that students will demonstrate at the end of a first-year writing sequence, of necessity, our document parses these outcomes into separate courses: WR 115, WR 121, and WR 222. We call out approximate stages of development that students will traverse as they recursively engage with process writing across the general education writing sequence.

As such, Lane's “outcomes” are sometimes written in process, rather than product language, reflecting what research in the teaching of writing tells us: student performance on written tasks (and improvement on given tasks), is messy, as is assessment of these processes, and dependent on multiple opportunities to compose, rethink, and revise, responding to and giving feedback.

The WPA Outcomes Statement describes the messiness in this way: "[The WPA Outcomes Statement] intentionally defines only 'outcomes,' or types of results, and not 'standards,' or precise levels of achievement. The setting of standards to measure students' achievement of these Outcomes has deliberately been left to local writing programs and their institutions."

Thus, our documents do not supply thresholds for performance (what the WPA calls “standards”) the way that outcome language does in other fields; rather, the outcomes describe the skills and behaviors that the student will practice and develop.

Per the recommendations from the WPA on assessment, our assessment work will examine a variety of student documents and attend to our culture and constraints, and involve local stakeholders in the process.

And, per the Framework for Success, we presume that faculty in other disciplines provide students with opportunities to compose in multiple contexts, for varied audiences, across genres and modalities. Oregon’s first-year writing sequence, while pivotal for the development of students’ composing, critical thinking, and deep reading practices, is not sufficient for the development of college students into competent writers and thinkers. The writing journey begun in first-year composition classes must, necessarily, continue in subsequent terms in disciplines outside of composition.