The Writing SySTEM: A Systemic Approach to Graduate Writing Instruction and Intervention

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Few graduate students receive sustained, discipline-specific foundational instruction in STEM writing, instead relying on ad-hoc support from faculty advisors. This form of writing support may work for students who already possess the knowledge and skills to write successfully in their fields, but it is not inclusive nor best practice. Moreover, without systematic writing support, students who are either members of populations historically underrepresented in STEM fields or international students especially face obstacles to success in graduate programs. For students who struggle to differentiate disciplinary characteristics of effective writing from their advisors’ idiosyncratic expectations, engaging in these existing forms of writing support can be confusing, frustrating, and futile. In addition, such writing instruction and intervention methods do not help students develop self-efficacy, i.e., the belief that they can carry out a specific task to achieve the desired result. It is anticipated that self-efficacy will lead to improved confidence in writing abilities and higher success rates for students. This NSF Innovations of Graduate Education (IGE) award to Auburn University will implement an innovative, multifaceted, sustainable writing program for graduate students in engineering. The structure of the program will encourage them to develop self-efficacy in writing. The research is innovative because it takes existing and evidence-based components of writing instruction and intervention — including workshops, graduate-level writing courses, small group writing support, and writing-intensive curriculum development — and integrates them within the disciplinary contexts of engineering. The research seeks to equip graduate students with strategies and resources for writing effectively in STEM fields and to establish evidence-based, systemic writing instruction and interventions that are sustainable, scalable, and adaptable across STEM contexts. The Writing SySTEM comprises four components: (1) workshops to teach writing skills and promote the recruitment of diverse participants into other components, (2) discipline-specific graduate writing courses, (3) peer writing groups, and (4) writing resources hosted on a publicly available Open Educational Resource site. Students may electively participate in any of the components. The goal of this research is to determine how components of the SySTEM, individually or in concert, affect STEM writing abilities by evaluating students from small (biosystems), medium (aerospace), and large (civil) graduate engineering programs at Auburn University. Relationships among self-efficacy, self-regulation of writing, and writing ability will be evaluated using direct and indirect measures. Student-focused direct measures include students’ self-efficacy and self-regulatory factors for writing and the quality of their writing as assessed by the research team. Indirectly, students will be interviewed to acquire additional information about their experiences participating in the Writing SySTEM’s components and their self-efficacy and self-regulatory factors for writing.The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.