Summing Up the Session: A Study of Student, Faculty, and Tutor Attitudes Toward Tutor Notes

It�s All in the Notes: What Session Notes Can Tell Us About the Work of Writing Centers

“…All of these features of the modern day documentation of writing center administration and "work" are time consuming and often redundant, and do not necessarily yield immediately relevant results. For example, Bugdal, Reardon, and Deans (2016) identify tutors' frustration with the time-consuming nature of session documentation because, to many, there is no clear reason for filling out session notes or other forms. It appears that the robust documentation and data collection in our centers is divorced from our practice.…”

“…Until recently, there has not been an easy way to explore or make sense of these types of documents, which often number in the thousands or tens of thousands for each writing center. Current published research on session notes (Brown, 2010;Bugdal et al, 2016) is limited in scope or outcome, perhaps because, as Schendel and Macauley (2012) identify, there is long-held resistance in writing center work towards quantitative methods of assessment (p. 3). However, Rich Haswell's (2005) call for more RAD (replicable, aggregable, and data supported) research in the broader field of composition studies has been taken up and interrogated by scholars in writing center studies (Driscoll & Perdue, 2012;Giaimo, 2017), and the field is seeing a renewed interest not only in quantitative research methods but, also, a new interest in big data studies.…”

“…Only one early study analyzes some of the general rhetorical moves that tutors make in filling out session notes (Cogie, 1998), though the study is limited in its data set and does not share any session note models/templates. A recent study by Bugdal et al (2016) provides a limited-scope discourse analysis of session notes as "types" (reporter, bro, coach, cheerleader, quick note) but ultimately focuses on the use-value of the notes (whether students find them helpful, what faculty and tutors think about them, and so forth) rather than exploring the rhetorical function of the notes prior to dissemination. Indeed, there is little research that has actually studied these documents from a rhetorical standpoint and that shares their findings (or even examples of the genre itself!…”

“…The studies that apply discourse analysis to session notes are either limited in scope or outcome (Brown, 2010;Bugdal et al, 2016). A notable exception is R. Mark Hall's recent book, Around the Texts of Writing Center Work: An Inquiry-Based Approach to Tutor Education (2017).…”