Collaborative Curriculum Design and Assessment: Piloting a Hybrid First-Year Writing Course
Carie S. Tucker King
Sara Keeth
Christopher J. Ryan
The University of Texas at Dallas
Abstract
We needed to provide options and to create space for first-year writing courses at a growing tier-one, four-year, public university. Therefore, three faculty members—the program director, the associate director, and a full-time teaching fellow—collaborated to create, pilot, and assess a hybrid version of our writing course. The teaching fellow taught four face-to-face sections of the course and then shifted her curriculum design to teach four hybrid sections the following semester. After both semesters, she provided blinded data to the other two faculty for collaborative assessment of three data sets: the student performances per assignment-specific and final grades, the instructor’s journal, and the students’ survey responses.
Students in the face-to-face and hybrid sections performed equally, with mean final grades differing by only 10.74 points on a 1000-point scale (means of 815.54 points in face-to-face and 804.80 in hybrid—a difference of 1.07%, which is not statistically significant). We discovered the value of journaling for the instructor to reflect, note questions, revisit design decisions, and document solutions for future courses. We identified issues in the course design and found that inconsistencies in assignment-specific grades were paralleled with concerns in the instructor’s journal and students’ survey responses. We also noted that collaborative design and assessment benefits our students, our faculty, our program, and our university.
About the Author(s)...
Carie King is a Clinical Professor of Communication and Associate Director of Rhetoric at The University of Texas at Dallas. She completed a BA in English from Baylor University; a MA in Technical Writing from the University of North Texas; a PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric from Texas Tech University; and a postdoctoral year in communication, ethics, and medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Dr. King worked as a medical editor for 14 years before joining the UTD faculty in 2008. At UTD, she teaches rhetoric, communication, and ethics and researches medical rhetoric, ethics, STEM communication, and online education. In 2017, she published her monograph, The Rhetoric of Breast Cancer: Patient-to-Patient Discourse in an Online Community, with Lexington Studies.
Sara Keeth is currently a Teaching Fellow at The University of Texas at Dallas. She earned her BA from Harding University and her MA and PhD from UTD. Dr. Keeth’s research interests include maternity in Shakespeare’s English history plays; writing and literature pedagogy; and the development of the novel in English, particularly related to women as authors and readers. Her most recent publication is “Teaching Resisting Reading,” part of the Tactics for Teaching a Diverse Past project, now available at Teaching the Middle Ages in Higher Ed.
Christopher J. Ryan is the Director of Rhetoric and Professional & Technical Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to joining the UTD faculty in 2009, Dr. Ryan served in various leadership roles during a 25-year career at EDS/HP. He holds a BA in English from St. Edward’s University, a MA in Advertising from The University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric from Texas Tech University. His research interests include rhetorical framing and writing pedagogy. Dr. Ryan has also co-authored Business and Technical Communication: A Guide to Writing Professionally, published by Kendall Hunt, 2014, and authored Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar: A Rhetorical Framing Study of Their Writings on Native Americans, by Lexington Books, 2018.
