Background and objective: Faculty identified the need for a gateway writing course (GWC) to prepare nurses for the writing requirements in the RN-to-BSN Completion (RNC) curriculum. This article describes the rationale for and development of a discipline-specific GWC developed for a RNC curriculum and reports research of student perspectives about the course and its effectiveness in preparing them to write in their nursing courses. Methods: The mixed method study included pre-and post-course surveys of self-efficacy in reading, writing, and research skills. Focus groups and interviews were used to identify readiness for and success in meeting curricular expectations for students who enrolled in the GWC and those who did not. Results: Statistically significant improvement occurred in all self-efficacy measures (reading: p ≤ .005, writing: p ≤ .01, accessing articles: p ≤ .005) from the beginning to the end of the GWC. Focus groups and interviews revealed five themes indicating improved readiness in students completing the GWC. Themes included perceptions of readiness, awareness, and preparedness for nursing courses; perceptions of confidence, mastery, efficiency, and self-sufficiency; enhanced knowledge of and ability to navigate academic processes and resourses; mastery of APA; and evidence of a reflective mindset and an evolving sense of professional identity. Conclusions: Students felt prepared for the RNC program after completing the GWC, and this sense of preparedness persisted throughout the program. The skills learned in the GWC allowed students to focus on understanding the professional concepts in nursing.
Using concepts and methods from technical and professional communication and linguistics, the authors conducted an observational study of the voice of community members (CMs) in the deliberation of a behavioral institutional review board (IRB). In the discourse of deliberation, they found that CMs had an effective voice in constructing the compliance of individual research protocols under IRB review. But they also found that CMs had an ineffective voice in representing their African-American community, particularly in their efforts to advocate for more consideration of minority research sites and subjects and a fuller consideration of minority community attitudes.
The use of reflective essays has become a key artifact of outcome-based writing assessment in the field of writing studies (White, 2005). However, scoring reflective essays may be influenced by textual features irrelevant to most outcomes and assessment rubrics. Two problematic features are teacher-pleasing, which Yancey (1996) called the "schmooze factor," and student-fashioning, which Miura (2018) related to identity formation. In this article, we present two mixed methods studies to examine the effects of these particular textual features on the direct assessment of first-year writing (FYW) reflective essays. In the first pilot study, we identified four textual features relevant to teacherpleasing and student-fashioning. In the second quasi-experimental study, we created a sample of FYW essays with and without these features. Two assessment teams then scored the essays in order to determine whether these features had statistically significant effects on assessment scores. The empirical results of these linked studies indicate these features did not have significant effects in a direct assessment of FYW reflective essays. However, in the discussion and conclusion, we argue our mixed methods approach offers a feasible and efficient set of research methods to examine specific textual features in the direct assessments of student writing.
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