Abstract
This research note focuses on administering a constructed response test before and immediately after students complete the required First-Year University Writing Seminar (UWS) to assess their ability to incorporate elements of the academic essay into their writing. The institution featured in this note is Brandeis University, a private research university outside of Boston with approximately 3,600 undergraduates. This study analyzes tests of 405 of the 852 incoming students before and after they took the UWS in the 2017-2018 academic year. By analyzing the data using means, paired t-tests, Pearson's tests, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and Tukey’s Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) test, researchers sought to identify areas of strength and areas for improvement to better guide writing instructors and curricular change. As we will show, the efficacy of such pretest-posttest designs is complicated by known issues in the design of writing assessment episodes such as ours.