In January a headline in the Bryan-College Station Eagle heralded disturbing results from a study of the literacy skills of graduating college seniors, declaring them “Close to Graduation, Far from Competent.”

The study, conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), found that “more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy.” In other words, more than half of the college graduates poised to enter our workforce “lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.”

The National Commission on Writing (NCW) has equally troubling news. Their recent research indicates that business and government leaders find college graduates unprepared to write on the job, prompting employers to spend millions annually on additional training.

Do these national studies reflect the situation at Texas A&M? In a 1999 report of focus groups conducted with Texas business leaders and educators, all of the groups interviewed considered graduates of Texas A&M University System schools deficient in written communication skills. These results, along with faculty complaints about the poor quality of student writing, prompted the call for writing-intensive courses at the College Station campus.

Part of the problem may be that students at Texas A&M are simply not getting enough writing experience. Consider the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). According to Mark Troy of Measurement and Evaluation Services, the 2005 NSSE results show that “42 percent of TAMU freshmen and 18 percent of TAMU seniors have written no papers of 5-19 pages. The percentages for freshmen and seniors at other doctoral-extensive universities are 14 percent and 10 percent respectively.”

While expecting students to write more is an important step, it won’t solve the whole problem. How we teach writing must also change. The NCW recommends not only that time spent teaching writing should be doubled, but that writing should also be taught across the curriculum. Instead of reviewing grammar or drilling students on format, writing instruction, says the NCW, should help students “stretch their minds” and “sharpen their analytical capabilities.”

The AIR study likewise notes that literacy is “significantly higher among students who say their coursework places a strong emphasis on applying theories or concepts to practical problems,” a finding which again supports the idea that the most effective writing instruction is done in the disciplines and asks students to apply their knowledge.

As demands for literacy escalate, Texas A&M graduates are barely keeping pace. In developing writing-intensive courses, we must remain mindful of what students today require: the fostering of critical thinking, critical reading, and critical writing, and practice with complex analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and problem solving. We hope our students will learn the ways of using language appropriate to the professional communities they eventually plan to join, and that they will adopt the common language practices we as academics value: integrity, careful reasoning, clarity, accuracy, and eloquence.

— Dr. Valerie M. Balester
Executive Director
University Writing Center
v-balester@tamu.edu

For links to the studies mentioned in this article, click to http://writingcenter.tamu.edu/newsletter.