In January 2018 and January 2020, we conducted surveys of all students who had taken a First Year Seminar (FYS) at Wesleyan during the previous fall.
In Spring and Summer 2021, we designed a coding protocol to analyze the comments that students wrote in three of the open-ended text boxes on the survey. In these boxes, students were asked to respond to three questions:
- What do you feel you learned in this course about academic writing generally and for a specific academic discipline?
- How did your fall FYS help you to learn and practice the necessary skills to be a successful college-level writer? Regarding academic writing, what were the strengths of this course? What will you use in future courses?
- What do you wish you had done more of, or learned more about, in your fall FYS regarding college-level academic writing? What do you want to work on more in future courses? What do you think would have been helpful?
