By Gregory R. Glau, Arizona State University

Asking Questions, Picturing Data

            To help get started with “inventing” some useful questions that you might ask about your own BW programs, and also to start thinking about how such data might be presented, here are a few examples from some of ASU’s data that—I think—provide those "nuggets" of information, small bits of the most important data, in capsule form.  I also want to touch on some examples of data we’ve come across here that is problematic, that leads to other questions—but it’s not the kind of information we’d necessarily want to publicize.

            My goal here is that perhaps my examples will help you to determine the kinds of information you might want to collect about your own students and their test scores and their pass rates and their retention rates—and so together we can learn a little bit about the use of hard data to best represent our BW programs.

            I’ll start with pass rates, as they are easy to calculate and often lend themselves to both tabular and graphical presentation.  (All of the following data are from ASU.)  Here’s a table showing pass rate information for the last few years, for our WAC 101 classes (the first class in our basic writing Stretch Program) ^[i]

Table 1

Raw Data and Pass Rates

            The pass rate for our WAC 101 students is moving up slowly—we don’t need to view this data in a chart to see that.  We can say, however, that the pass rate for WAC 101 students averages over 90 percent, and for the last few years, has been improving. 

            Here’s an example of how one piece of data can lead to more questions (and sometimes to answers): I was curious when I saw this data, about the leap in enrollment for the fall 2000 semester, so I just checked our current (fall 2001) WAC 101 enrollment: it’s 898.  Using the same placement system (we place on the basis of ACT or SAT scores, and the average SAT verbal for all of our students has actually been increasing, slightly, for the past couple of years), we have placed many more students, the past two fall semesters, into our basic writing program.

            The numbers don’t mean much, of course, in raw form, so we should see what percentage of our students are placed into our BW program, or whether our ENG 101 enrollment has been growing at about the same rate.  Here’s the WAC 101 / ENG 101 comparative information:

Table 2

Enrollment data and Percentages for WAC 101

            Now we can see that the WAC 101 students, as a percentage of the total student population in WAC 101 and ENG 101, is up a little, but nothing like it appeared, judging from the raw numbers.  Now, I’m wondering why the fall 1999 percentage of placement into Stretch dropped . . . but that’s another story. 

            Let's get back to pass rates.  WAC 101 students go on to take ENG 101 the following semester.  Does the extra semester of writing experience they receive in WAC 101 help them in ENG 101?  Figure 1 is a graph that shows pass rates for our "regular" ENG 101 students, as compared to those who previously took WAC 101, for the last six academic years.

Figure 1

Pass rates, Stretch students vs. "regular" ENG 101 students

            Clearly, the extra semester of writing experiences helps students pass ENG 101 at a higher rate.  Note, though, that we also could ask, should the difference be even higher?  That is, should our BW class (WAC 101) make even more of a difference in terms of ENG 101 pass rate?

            Here at ASU, we have a student "success in college" class, called UNI 100.  Many, but not all, of our BW students take UNI.  Placement into UNI is up to the individual student—an advisor may suggest they take it, but the student decides.

Table 3

Pass Rates, WAC 101 and WAC 101 + UNI 100

            The data on the left side in table 3 lists the same pass rates for a four-year period (1995-1998) for WAC 101 students.  For the four years shown, students who took both WAC 101 and the student-success course UNI 100 passed WAC 101 at a higher rate—sometimes more than two percent better than those students who took just WAC 101.

            This tells me that there may be some correlation between these data—that my BW students may benefit from taking UNI 100 the same semester they take WAC 101.

            While the information I've mentioned above indicates some positive things (improving pass rates, for example), once you start collecting your own information, you'll learn things you won't want to publicize, or that will lead you to more questions. 

Here's an example: 

Figure 2

Pass Rates, students from under-represented

Groups, WAC 101 compared to ENG 101

            Figure 2 pictures some problematic data for us, focusing on students from traditionally under-represented groups.  For some reason, our basic writing WAC 101 students who self-identify as African American or Hispanic American pass WAC 101 at a higher rate than do students from the same groups, when they take “regular” ENG 101.  Put another way, students from these two “groups” pass WAC 101 at a higher rate than their same counterparts in ENG 101.  However, students from two other groups—Asian American and Native American—pass WAC 101at lower rates than do those same “groups” in ENG 101.  Why does what we do in WAC 101 “work” better for two groups of students, but not for all students?  Does this indicate a weakness in our WAC 101 pedagogy?  Textbook or teacher selection?  Placement?  Should we perhaps not place students from the two groups WAC doesn’t work as well for (Asian American and Native American) into WAC 101, but instead into ENG 101?  I don’t know—but this is the kind of information we now need to follow-up on, to try to dig a little more deeply, to try to understand and to learn from it.

            Finally, Figure 3 shows what’s been happening in one of our classes in terms of grades.  While the overall pass rate has fluctuated slightly, the change in grade distribution is striking.

Figure 3

Grade distribution, ENG XXX

            For the first two years, the distribution of the percentages of students receiving A, B, or C-grades remained about the same.  From the third year on, however, more students were getting an A, while fewer (on a percentage bases) were receiving Bs and Cs.  Where several years ago about 40% of students received a grade of A for this class, now more than 60% get As (and the trend seems upward).  Why?  Did our pedagogy or grading scale change in some way?  Is this a change for the better and if so, why?