Measuring Writing Across the Curriculum in Nursing Education: The Role and Support of Learning to Write by Writing

Abstract

Multiple push and pull factors exert themselves on the planning, organization, and assessment of writing assignments across undergraduate nursing curricula. Such factors may lead to a lack of faculty awareness around the role, type, length, and evaluation of writing tasks. This report discusses one institution’s efforts to understand Writing Across the Curriculum. Researchers analysed syllabi’s written work requirements for all courses, classifying tasks by type, required length, relative difficulty, grade weight, and characterization by Bloom’s Taxonomy level. Findings revealed unanticipated volumes and variance of writing genres and a largely scaffolded curriculum, despite lack of direct, top-down pre-planning. Reflection on the process uncovered what the authors term “Learning to Write by Writing” (LWW), an overarching descriptor not encompassed by Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), Writing to Learn (WTL), or Writing in the Discipline (WID), and the critical role of Writing Centres in supporting LWW among faculty.