Re: Writing Center surveys

[jgarbus@mail.utexas.edu]

I'd like to see the replies to this too! I'm assistant director of the
writing center at UT Austin (home of Sara Kimball and Elisabeth
Piedmont-Marton) and I've been thinking about going into UT first year
composition classes and doing a survey about our writing center. (Grad
students who teach first year writing at UT are all required to work at the
writing center as well. So we tend to enthusiastically push the writing
center's services to our classes, and a fair number of first-year comp
students do show up.)
 General questions I might ask: have you ever been to the writing center;
if so, why did you go; if not, why haven't you gone; if you went, did you
find it useful, how, why or why not?
So, I'm interested if others on the list have done surveys like this and
what they got back-- or if y'all know of any articles in WCJ, RTE, etc
about student evaluations of writing center conferences. (I've found only
one, an Oct. 1987 RTE piece.)
Of course, thinking about this raises a whole host of other issues: what
counts as "useful" (a more positive attitude about writing? a higher grade
on a particular paper? an enjoyable conference at the writing center? a new
idea about outlining? an explanation of a grammar issue?); do consultants'
(our term here for tutors) ideas of productive conferences parallel
consultee's ideas; how might students' responses to this survey be affected
by hindsight, by the grade they got on the paper they came in about, etc?
Etc. And of course all of these could evoke hosts of subquestions:  for
example, different consultants have different ideas about what constitutes
a "good" consult...

 I seem to remember that a similar issue came up here a while ago ...thanks
for revisting an old (but perennial, I'm sure) topic.
Julie

Julie Garbus
Assistant Director, Undergraduate Writing Center
The University of Texas at Austin