The University of Arkansas at Little Rock: Department of Rhetoric and Writing

First-Year Writing Program Outcomes: The Foundation of the Program

The WPA Outcomes for the first-year composition program are the foundation upon which the curricula for the courses are built. All courses provide an evaluative framework for assessing the first-year composition program. Our approach to assessment focuses on digital portfolios, which serve as the apex of assessment because they enable us to determine if the outcomes for the program have been reached.

RHET 0321, 0310, 1311, 1312, and 1320 derive their course objectives from the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) and sanctioned by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. (See http://wpacouncil.org/ for the full statement of the WPA Outcomes for First-Year Composition.) The Outcomes suggest objectives for what the students should be able to do at the end of each writing course.

The Outcomes for the First-Year Program at UA Little Rock are:

Rhetorical Knowledge

• Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts

• Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes

• Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure

• Understand and use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences

• Match the capacities of different environments (e.g., print and electronic) to varying rhetorical situations

Critical Reading, Thinking and Writing

• Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts

• Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations

• Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials, including journal articles and essays, books, scholarly and professionally established and maintained databases or archives, and informal electronic networks and internet sources

• Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate the writer's ideas with those from appropriate sources

Processes

• Develop a writing project through multiple drafts

• Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing

• Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas

• Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes

• Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress

• Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities

• Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence their work

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Knowledge of Conventions

• Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising

• Understand why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, tone, and mechanics vary

• Gain experience negotiating variations in genre conventions

• Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of texts

• Explore the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions

• Practice applying citation conventions systematically in their own work.