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1.4 Evidence of Efficacy

Johanna L. Phelps

 

In preliminary research on the community engagement practices at WSU Vancouver, we have collected data that suggests students in community-engaged sections of English 402 were more apt to indicate mastery of learning outcomes for the course. Students in Fall 2019, when we piloted this program, completed an end-of-semester survey asking them to self-report on achievement of student learning outcomes from the syllabus, with no prompting from the researcher or faculty. Forty-three respondents were in the community engaged intervention group and 45 respondents reported after their participation in traditional delivery model, a combined 73% response rate.

 

Students responded on a seven-point Likert scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree in response to statements regarding whether English 402 prepared them to, for instance, compose rhetorically effective documents. As an example of the CE curriculum’s efficacy, of those who responded, nearly double the students in community-engaged sections strongly agreed that English 402 provided them “strategies for composing rhetorically effective documents.” Additionally, there was a marked increase in respondents from community-engaged sections who “strongly agreed” (again, one of seven on a scale) that English 402 helped them successfully collaborate on writing projects (40% of CE intervention compared to 23.26% of control), manage large research project (22.22% of CE interventions compared to 13.95% of control) and recognize ethical issues in technical and professional communication (42.22% of CE intervention compared to 34.88% of control). Marked improvement in CE students’ self-reported competency in planning and drafting, revising, and disseminating written work were also apparent in the pilot study. Moreover, students in the CE sections felt more comfortable evaluating and responding to the writing of others.

 

Community engagement is not a new teaching practice, but the unique way we use it as a teaching process at WSU Vancouver hasn’t had much research conducted, which is why we continue to research student learning outcomes each semester. In research ethics, there are many ways of looking at interventions, or at new ways of doing things and assessing their efficacy. One route is to examine a brand-new strategy and determine if it improves outcomes for participants, with the potential that there may be negative outcomes (for instance, think of a medical treatment that might help cure a specific type of cancer but has anticipated consequences that are negative, like partial hearing loss or long term malaise). Another route is to suggest that if a new strategy does not harm, and has the potential for benefit, it should be practiced (beneficence) to see its efficacy. In your technical writing course, your instructor is using community engagement not as a new intervention that’s not been tested or evaluated. Instead, this learning opportunity has been designed based on a long legacy of research that suggests with the right constructs, community engagement can improve your ability to master the learning objectives in this course.

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1.4 Evidence of Efficacy by Johanna L. Phelps is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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