UC Irvine

Writing centers in colleges and universities provide a variety of services to support today’s culturally and linguistically diverse student populations as they navigate the challenges of writing in higher education and enter new disciplinary communities(Grimm, 2009). This assistance can include everything from help on grammar and organization to support interpreting assignment prompts and instructor feedback (Harris, 1995; Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2014). However, even though many students report finding center services useful, tutors seldom see the final, finished versions of student work, and it is often unclear exactly what students are really taking away with them from their writing center visits (Corbett, 2015; Missakian et al., 2016).

To better understand how students respond to the assistance they receive from writing center tutors after they leave the center, why some students might choose to use the writing center more often than others, and what role the writing center might play in the larger context of students’ experiences with college writing, this study explores the following research questions:

1) What do students say they are learning from their writing center conferences, and how does it compare with what tutors say they are discussing?

2) How or to what extent does the advice and feedback students receive on an assignment influence their writing and revision processes for that specific text?

3) How do student users view the writing center, and how do they position the center within their college writing experiences?

This study took place at the writing center of a large public university in California. In addition to the exit surveys and consultation reports routinely collected by the center, conference recordings, pre and post consultation drafts, and interviews for 28 undergraduates who used the writing center at least once over the course of one academic year were collected and analyzed. Results revealed that:

• The writing topics that students reported learning about during their writing center visits were similar to what tutors reported discussing. Among these, there was a balance of both global or higher-order concerns and local or sentence-level issues, similar to what has been found in previous studies, with organization, overall structure, and flow being an area of particular emphasis.

• After leaving the writing center, students usually made some attempt to respond to all the suggestions that tutors made, although their response to suggestions that involved making complex or large-scale revisions was greatly impacted by other factors such as interpretation of tutor feedback, time constraints, note-taking, and personal likes and dislikes.

• Although students agreed that they learned transferable writing strategies from their writing center consultations and reported continuing to use those strategies independently on other writing assignments, students primarily sought out the writing center to support their writing and revising of a particular task. High-stakes writing and writing in unfamiliar genres were common reasons for students to return to the writing center, and center tutors served as especially important resources for students who wanted more or different feedback than they were receiving from class, students who especially valued feedback from professionals or experts they considered credible and trustworthy, and students who did not have other sources of writing support like skilled writer friends or family.

Implications for students, course instructors, and writing centers will be discussed.