When this year’s seniors were freshmen, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric began collecting writing samples from a randomly-selected 12.5 percent of the class as part of the Stanford Study of Writing, or SSW. The goals were to observe and evaluate the ways in which students’ writing develops, and to use the findings to strengthen the writing services Stanford offers.

The selected students have continued to submit papers throughout their time at Stanford and will be asked to evaluate their writing skills a year after they graduate, said Andrea Lunsford, director of PWR and the project’s principal investigator.

Similar studies have been performed on grade school students, but rarely on college students, she said.

“We are not evaluating the writing — only gathering it and describing it,” Lunsford added.

So far, the study has gathered more than 10,000 writing contributions from 189 students. Lunsford said she expects the total number of submissions to jump to 12,000 or 13,000 by the end of next year. In addition to providing writing samples, the students respond twice a year to surveys about writing experiences and resources at Stanford.

“Writing is very plastic; it molds and adapts itself to whatever is around it,” Lunsford said. “Writing absorbs technologies and changes them into powerful communication mediums. SSW is a longitudinal study that creates a profile of writing at Stanford and explores the development of writing and rhetoric, especially in an increasingly technological world.”

She said that the college years are a particularly opportune time to cultivate writing skills.

“Students’ cognitive abilities are challenged constantly, enabling them to think in increasingly complex and sophisticated ways,” Lunsford said.

In its early research stages, SSW primarily evaluated essays. But as the study progressed, the researchers began to incorporate PowerPoint presentations, Web pages, movies and flash presentations, which the team considers to be valuable writing samples as well, said Corinne Arraez, the academic technology specialist for PWR who designed the study’s database.

“We’re excited to see the students use all different media in thoughtful projects,” Arraez said. “Media has the reputation of being superficial and gimmicky, but we’re seeing students use images, sound and even videos to create meaningful messages. We’re simply exploring the relationship of medium to message.”

In addition to conducting the all-encompassing study, SSW has performed a more focused evaluation of I-HUM papers from the class of 2005. Lunsford said the team observed significant levels of improvement between first- and third-quarter writing.

Lunsford added that she plans to approach the data differently by focusing on case studied during her sabbatical next year.

“We are less interested in sweeping generalizations than about individual improvements,” she said.

To further evaluate the data that has been collected, the researchers are creating a rubric to determine the students’ representation of self, connection to an audience and use of evidence and sources in their writing.

Lunsford and Arraez said that, so far, SSW has come to three main conclusions. First, students generally adapt their writing to a particular audience. In high school, students wrote for their teachers, but college students often cater to a broader readership. Second, most student writing is motivated by a desire to make something happen in the world. Lastly, students conceptualize writing as performance and that for some, writing has become very personal.