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Jessica Wang
Heather Hill
ENGL 281 A
12 March 2015
Maneuvering the Gap Between High School and College Writing
INTRODUCTION
The transition from high school-level writing to college-level writing is a tricky one to
make because the expectations of students in their writing are extremely different. Recently it has
come to the attention of writing studies scholars that, perhaps, the current popular methods of
teaching freshman composition in college are no longer providing students with adequate
preparation for college writing. While existing studies have suggested new ways instructors can
teach college freshman composition courses so that freshmen from their course will be better
prepared for other college courses, not very many have focused on how we can facilitate the
transition from writing at the high school level to the college level. In order to do this, we need to
understand the types of skills that students most often take with them from high school into first
year composition courses, and then what sorts of things first year composition course can teach
that would benefit the students in their future writing endeavors. In this paper, I present my
findings from doing a case study on a specific freshman composition course and conclude that
one of the skills we can teach students about in first year composition courses is an awareness of
the different genres in writing. From examining how students in the class I studied picked up this
skill, I present data on one method in which this skill can be taught. In the end, I didnt have
enough data to conclude and so, instead, present and support a hypothesis that there is a likely

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chance that these students will transfer this skill successfully to other courses they will take at the
university.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Previous research suggests that the biggest challenge students face is how different the
goals of high school English classes and college level writing courses are. Wendy Strachan, a
university writing teacher, writes in her article Talking about the Transition about her
discovery that a common goal among high school English teachers is to make sure their students
will pass the twelfth grade timed writing exam (138). What this implies is that high school
courses are more likely to give students lots of instruction as to how to write timed essays, but
the fact of the matter remains that timed essays are not as important in college as other forms of
writing. According to Gail Stygall, a scholar at the University of Washington, the biggest
difference between the typical literature-centered curriculum in high schools and college writing
is that college writing is centered around the academic world, and often essays speak to each
other, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly in a larger conversation (1). College writing
calls for students to be aware of the context of which in they are writing, draw on the ideas of
previous authors that have come before them, and respond effectively to these sources ultimately
in the form of an argument. As numerous authors have pointed out before (Fox 2002, Scherff and
Piazza 2011, Stygall 2005, Strachan 2002), the type of writing education aimed towards test
preparation is popular in high schools but does not always prepare students to do college level
workthe expectations of the students are at two completely different levels. This gap between
the writing expectations is a challenge for first-years entering the university, and so facilitating
the transition that happens between the two levels of course work becomes all the more
important.

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Scholars who have studied the differences in high school and college writing recognize
that this transition is in no way easy to facilitate either. Janet Alsup and Michael Bernard-Donals
claim in their co-authored article titled The Fantasy of the Seamless Transition that
seamlessness may not be an appropriate or realistic goal, the main problem being that there
simply no such thing as college-writing (117). In other words, the idea that there is discrete
knowledge students can learn as to how to write or conduct the correct writing process is a
myth. Although Alsup and Bernard-Donals claim it is practically impossible to provide students
with a secondary education that is guaranteed to prepare them for the diverse requirements of
college writing, other research suggests that educators can provide students with strong
foundations in various skillsets so that they may be better prepared for what they encounter in
college.
Because high school curriculum persists to be centered mainly around college admissions
test preparation, the duty of preparing students for writing across college disciplines has often
fallen on first-year composition courses (commonly dubbed FYCs for short), usually taken as a
freshman in college. A major problem for students is that they fail to realize that, in college, no
longer is writing simply the product of generalized essay skills or limited to writing about topics
in an English class. The various disciplines that one can study become rather specific, and so
writing in a discipline requires conventions specific to that particular discipline. Douglas Downs
and Elizabeth Wardle are two important researchers in this field of study. The method of teaching
FYC Downs and Wardle suggest in their article titled Teaching about Writing, Righting
Misconceptions: (Re)envisioning First-Year Composition as Introduction to Writing Studies
proposes that one way of teaching students would explicitly about different writing genres. They
lay out a curriculum plan in their article in which students are asked to research about writing in

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a certain genre or discipline of their choice. The idea is that the course about writing becomes a
writing course in which students study writing to learn more about it and potentially improve
their own (Downs and Wardle 562).
However, in order for this method to be effective, students should to be able to apply
what they have learned from one writing setting to the other. Doing the aforementioned research
project would be of little benefit to the students if they cant repeat this process of assessing
writing in other genres outside of that particular class. This is why teaching to educate students
about writing genres is also teaching for transfer. According to David Perkins and Gaveriel
Salomon, two of the most prominent figures in transfer theory, transfer of learning occurs when
learning in one context enhances (positive transfer) or undermines (negative transfer) a related
performance in another context (Transfer of Learning abs 1). The issue of transfer becomes
important in education when, as Perkins and Salomon put it, the transfer would not be thought
of as ordinary learning. For example, a student may show certain grammar skills on an English
test (ordinary learning) but not in everyday speech (the hoped-for transfer) (Transfer of
Learning 3). In other words, educators cannot assume that the phenomena of transfer will
always occur and have to take that into account when they are teaching. The teaching of writing
skills is no different.
Within the science of transfer itself, Perkins and Salomon identify three different theories
of transfer: the Bo Peep theory, Lost Sheep theory, and the Good Shepherd theory. Perkins and
Salomons Bo Peep theory of transfer assumes that knowledge and skill a person has learned
anywhere will come home to wherever it is needed (The Science and Art 16). The idea is that
students will apply what they learned in one setting to another automatically, and nothing has to
be done to facilitate transfer. This is not often the case in classroom settings, however. Perkins

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and Salomons second theory, the Lost Sheep theory, is the theory that we should shape
education to teach in carefully targeted ways specifically to the performances we want (The
Science and Art 22). In other words, this is the complete denial of transfer and the idea that we
should just teach for the desired consequences. The third theory Perkins and Salmon propose,
and perhaps the most significant, is the Good Shepard Theory which states transfer to new
situations is not easy and does not happen on its own; it requires the mindful abstraction of a
principle, the effortful search in ones memory, the selection of the appropriate principle and,
finally, its application to a new instance (The Science and Art 32). It is important to note that
this last theory relies heavily on not only the teacher to facilitate such a transfer but also the
students to be active in applying learned skills. This third theory is the one Im the most
interested in exploring and the most important for my research.
Applying transfer theory to the topic of transition in writing, Mary Jo Reiff and Anis
Bawarshi, in their article titled Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use Prior Genre
Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition, conducted a study
on what it is students take from high school into their first year college composition courses. As
they state in their introduction, they focus on incomes instead of the outcomes of first year
composition courses (313), and from this, they infer that students previous learning in high
school really does have an impact on how open they are to learning new perceptions of genre in
college. As their data shows, there are both what they term boundary crossers (students who
engaged in high-road transfer as they repurposed and reimagined their prior genre knowledge for
use in new contexts) and boundary guarders (students who seem to guard more tightly and
engage in low-road transfer of their prior genre knowledge, even in the face of new and disparate
tasks) (Reiff and Bawarshi 325). The boundary crossers were the ones that successfully did

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transfer and repurposed their knowledge from high school to adapt to new writing expectations,
while the boundary guarders were ones that refused to do such change easily. Reiff and
Bawarshis study was just the first of many that need to be done if we are to understand the high
school to college transition better.
The main question I address in this paper is: how should we teach first year writing
courses so that students may be more adequately prepared to enter the world of academic
writing, and how can we help students successfully make the required transition discussed
previously? Downs and Wardle ultimately come to the conclusion that the answer lies in making
students more aware of genre and different writing situations so that they may participate in these
larger academic conversations more effectively. Reiff and Bawarshi suggest that talking about
genres can facilitate students metacognitive reflection in, we think, productive ways (333), so a
popular idea is that students must be taught about genre awareness and/or taught how to think
about how the work they do for separate disciplines is different from one another. Reiff and
Bawarshi conclude their article by inviting teachers and scholars to consider what it would take
to study prior genre knowledge in its fuller complexity (333). My paper is an attempt to do such
and build off these previous studies.
METHODOLOGY
In this research project, I investigated how a first-year composition course teaches its
students not only to become aware of different writing contexts but also to modify previous
writing habits that the students had acquired from high school. More specifically, I looked at the
University of Washington Academy Programs English 198 course, which is a course specifically
designed for first-year Academy students (Acads for short). According to the UW Academys
website, UW Academy students leave high school after tenth grade to become full time college

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undergraduates. They cannot be in high school and college at the same time, which is what sets
the Academy apart from Running Start Programs. Acads receive direct admission into the UWs
Honors Program when they are accepted, and in the admission process, the program website
states they specifically seek students who are motivated to starting college two years early, love
to learn, and seek out academic challenges. English 198 is a writing composition course linked
with Academy 197, a special once a week lecture for Acads, and both are both a part of the
Academys Bridge Program, which is specifically designed to facilitate the transition between
tenth grade and college.1
What makes this English 198 class unique from other freshman composition courses is
that the students taking this class are a specific population of students who are younger than the
average college freshman and assumed to be more enthusiastic about their learning. Academy
197, the course linked with English 198, teaches students about various topics related to
embryology and bioethics. Combined together, these two classes from the UW Academy
curriculum invite Acads to understand higher level scientific writings while, in the process,
teaching them how writing operates in different writing disciplines.
In this research project, I explored how English 198 prepares its students for the rigors of
college academia. The reason I chose Academy English 198 instead of any other freshman
composition course at the University of Washington is because this course is a special class
designed for aiding Acads in integrating into the larger university. The idea was that Acads,
because theyve only had two years of high school, may not have as much preparation for
college that the standard four years of high school wouldve given them, and so English 198
would be taught in a certain way that would make up for this difference. I was curious to see
what tools the classes provided students to make them successful in college. Although the design
1 http://depts.washington.edu/cscy/programs/academy/

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of the Academy may not work in other university settings, the purpose of my research is to tell
the story of this particular class so that we may know more about how to facilitate a transition
between high school and college, especially for students writing.
In my study, I relied on four main sources of evidence: an interview with the instructor of
Acad English 198; analysis of the course syllabus, readings, and assignment prompts; class
observations; and a survey of the Acads currently taking English 198 this year (Fall 2011). I
strove to obtain both the point of views of the professor and students so that I could get a better
picture of both sides to this class.
The first step I took was talking to the instructor in order to learn more about how this
particular section of English 198 is structured. I wanted to know what sorts of things were
considered in the making of the Acad curriculum, what the Acads writing assignments consisted
of, what assumptions and expectations the Acad staff have about the Acads writing skills
previous to taking this class, and what the main goals of this course were. I was provided with
access to the course syllabus and assignment readings so I could get a sense of the type of
material and assignments Acads were dealing with. After this interview, I was given permission
to sit in on one of the classes in order to observe the learning process Acads go through and what
sorts of things they were learning. The class was split into groups to do group work, and while
they were working in groups, I visited from group to group to get a general idea of how Acads
approached making sense of difficult scientific articles.
The last step in my research was a survey to gauge what the Acads thought about how their
writing was changing and how it differed from writing they had done previously in high school. I
also specifically asked questions that would pinpoint what it was that the Acads thought was
most important in their English 198. The purpose of this was to learn more about what were the

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key points students were taking away from the class and how they felt their writing skills were
changing because of what the class is teaching them. I made this decision to do a survey instead
of interviews because 1) the Acads would feel less pressured doing the surveys on their own time
when they had the most time, 2) I would be able to get a larger number of responses with a
survey instead of having to set up interview appointments with everyone, and 3) the survey
would remain anonymous, which would help the Acads feel a greater sense of security in filling
out the survey.
As with any research process, I realize there are limitations and potential flaws in my
research. When doing class observations, my presence was definitely a factor that affected how
the Acads behaved in class. I noticed Acads getting a bit nervous when I came to join their
groups, which is understandable seeing as I was doing research and taking notes on the class, and
this might have intimidated them and caused them not to talk as much when I was around. Once
I noticed this, I decided to go around the room from group to group in order to get a more
general picture of how it was Acads learned and to insure that the Acads could have some time to
work left alone. One consequence of me doing this was that I was able to get a better picture as
to how the different groups had their own learning strategies and in what ways they were similar
and different. As a result, my method allowed me to get a more overall picture of the Acads
learning strategies.
In my survey, I realize that my questions might have directed the Acads to respond in a
certain way despite my efforts to keep them open. I already had an idea of what kind of answers I
expected to get from the Acads, and this might have factored into the framing of my questions.
Nonetheless, I had to ask my questions in some way, and at least the fact that the survey asks

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each Acad the same questions in the same way helps to facilitate the consistency of the
responses.
Other limitations on my research include a restricted amount of time and resources to do
this project. I did not have the time to do as thorough of a case study required to answer my
research questions completely. I can only partially answer my question on how can we facilitate
the transition through a teaching of navigating disciplines, and I can only guess as to whether or
not the students will transfer these skills outside of this class based off of what I know about
what they have done in class. One factor that may have influenced my perception of the results I
do have is the fact that I personally have high regards for the Academy program, being an Early
Entrance student myself, and so therefore my observations may be affected by this opinion.
However, I am not an Acad, and so I do not have any personal feelings about the Acad classes,
nor did I know much about them before I embarked on my research. This is what makes me feel
I can still accurately report on this topic.
DATA & FINDINGS
The UW Academys English 198 course is specifically designed to help students
transition from high school writing to college writing. In the class syllabus, the instructor writes,
We will also spend much of our time in class developing your sense of what makes for effective
writing within a given discipline. Aside from having an the Academy 197 counterpart, English
198 itself seems to have two parts to it: the first few weeks are spent reading texts about ethics,
and the second half of the quarter the students read the scientific reports of experiments.
According to the professor, Academy students are generally good writers, but theyve often
learned a particular style of writing that isnt, um, terribly appropriate for academic writing.
So theres a little of lets-talk-about what academic writing is and how its different from what

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youve been working on in high school, um, and they pick it up really fast (field notes). One of
the focuses of the class is to help Acads realize the differences between the type of writing
theyve done previously and the type that is now asked of them in the university setting.
According to the sample of Acads that took my survey (13 of them total), the biggest
difference between writing for 198 and for high school was that now they actually have to work
on the quality of the content of their papers versus just the wording and belletristic appeal. In
fact, part of what the class does is show them how unimportant belletristic writing qualities are in
a paper compared to the actual arguments. On my survey question that asked the Acads what
they thought the biggest difference was between the writing they did for high school and for the
writing in English 198, one student specifically wrote, the biggest difference is how to structure
an argument. That wasnt something I learned in high school englisha flat-out 5 paragraph
essay was always required, but in ENGL 198 we get to write in our own style. Yet another
wrote, With exceptions, high school writing has been about following a formula. In ENGL 198,
Ive definitely noticed myself questioning how to communicate my ideas in the best way
possible. The responses from the Acads show how they not only have become aware of the
limitations to the writing style they learned in high school, but also how they realize that English
198 is a class in which the goal is to help them improve their writing and prepare them for the
type of writing that will be demanded of them in college.
This brings us to the question of what the specific goals of the class Acad English 198
are. With regards to what Acads should be learning about their writing, the instructor said,
When I have them work in class on short assignments up to the first main
assignment, Im real clear that what theyre dealing with is ideas. You know, that
they shouldnt be worrying about fine points of grammar or stylistic issues at this

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point. What we want is clarity and accuracy in the presentation of ideasa kind
of completeness in making arguments.
This emphasis on ideas is one of the shifts Acads are prompted to make when re-evaluating their
writing processes. Indeed, this was reflected in the class observations I made in one of their
classes.
In the specific class I sat in on, the students were talking about a rather complicated
article titled Neurons derived from reprogrammed fibroblasts functionally integrate into the
fetal brain and improve symptoms of rats with Parkinsons disease. Obviously, some of the
science that the article talks about was beyond the Acads original knowledge, but I discovered
that, through group discussion and collaboration with fellow classmates, the Acads were able to
make sense of this complex scientific article. What was most interesting was the process they
took in order to get there. Firstly, the class was told to get into small groups of four to five
people, and each were given basic guidelines from the professor to 1) answer study questions
provided to them, 2) work on understanding the material, 3) be able to explain to the content of
the research article in their own words as if they were to be explaining it to someone who doesnt
normally do science, and 4) come up with a list of questions if they had any. After that, the Acads
got into groups, which worked independently of one another. Each group had a slightly different
process they took to get their work done, but the overall methods I saw were the same. First the
Acads made clear exactly what it was they knew and what it was they werent sure about. Then
they would walk through the study questions provided to them (mostly questions asking them
about the content and to think critically about why the article might include such) and discuss,
figuring out the answers for themselves. Frequently, I observed that one person in a group would
have a question about something they didnt understand in the article and ask fellow Acads about

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it. What followed was usually a response from one of the other Acads about what he or she had
interpreted from the article, and then the whole group together would refer back to the article to
find out the answer to the question. This method was usually very productive and there were a lot
of aha! moments when the Acads were able to discover important details by themselves (field
notes). In addition to these conversations, the instructor would come around to each group every
now and then to check-in on them, answer any questions they had, and ask them new questions
to challenge their thinking as well as make sure they were paying attention to the necessary
details. When I asked the instructor in my interview what his teaching method was in the
classroom, he told me that the Acads do a lot of the work. In some ways, I dont do very much
stand up in the front of the room talk teaching. Mostly my teaching is framing the tasks and
then turning loose to figure stuff out themselves. What I saw in the classroom affirms this
assertion and also confirms that this strategy leads to the Acads understanding the complex
scientific article.
In theory, the work the Acads are doing in class is supposed to mirror what they will have
to be doing when they enter separate disciplines of study on their own. The class syllabus
explicitly says to the Acads, All of these activities have one goal in mind: to help you develop
as a critic and reviser of your own and others' academic prose. And in the process, since this
writing occurs in a disciplinary context, you will become a better thinker about the topics you are
studying and writing about in the Academy course. In addition, what I observed in class
supports what the Acad instructor told me the overlying goal of English 198 is for Acads:
I think what they hopefully come away feeling is that they can walk into these
areas that they, in some cases, didnt even know existed and begin to make sense
of things, find that there are resources available to them that they might not have

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known about or felt too daunted to ever approach, and, here it turns out that they
can actually approach a lot of these stuff.what I want them to take away most is
the experience of having worked through difficult material, put it in clear
coherent, focused prose, um, having worked through a series of drafts and
revisions to do that, and feeling the confidence that when they meet these kinds of
challenges they can do it again.
This type of experiential learning is what Acad English 198 is all aboutits about introducing
Acads to difficult material and letting them discover their methods of understanding so that in the
future when theyre in their other university classes, theyll know what steps to take to start
making sense of new material.
In my survey, I asked the Acads to reflect upon the work they were doing and put in their
own words what they thought the goal of English 198 was. Heres a sample of quotes from what
the students said that encompasses many of the main points the Acads told me:
I think the goal is to teach us how to attack difficult readings that weve never seen
before, and to simplify them so that everyone is able to understand them.
I think were learning mainly how to write in a discipline, specifically biology and
philosophy.
The goal of Engl 198 is to break us out of the strict format of high school writing and
ease us into college writing, where clarity and organization are the keys to good writing.
The goal of Engl 198 is to help freshman students develop writing skills through
practice, but also to strengthen the students understanding of texts. The writing helps us
to see how we can make logical connections between complex ideas, as well as how to

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take a complex work and boil it down such that a common person would be able to
understand the work.
The students pick up on the fact theyre dealing with a specific discipline within writing and
learning how to adjust their writing to better suit the requirements of writing in that specific
discipline. They also report that theyre learning how to deal with complex ideas and make sense
of them, much like the way the instructor said they should and the way I saw them doing this
firsthand in class.
DISCUSSION
In my research data, I discovered the answers to two important questions: 1) What can we
teach students in first year composition courses in an effort to prepare them with the skills
necessary to delve into college material, and 2) how can we go about teaching those skills? In
response to the first question, Acad English 198 proposes a method of teaching in which the goal
is to teach students not only how different disciplines require different styles of writing, but also
how they can adjust their own writing to match the conventions required for writing in that
specific discipline. This being said, Acad English 198 presents to us a style of teaching that
involves letting the students be active and independent learners and figure out for themselves
how to tackle new difficult material. As the instructor said, his philosophy of teaching is
framing the tasks and then turning [the Acads] loose to figure stuff out themselves (field
notes). In addition to this, the class teaches Acads what makes the writing conventions of a
certain discipline so effective in the first place. For example, the questions that students were
prompted to think about in class were things such as why the results section of a scientific article
would want to be split up into various subsections, and how these sections work together to
provide a logic for the article. The idea is that the Acads, after being prompted to look at such

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parts of their readings critically, would come to understand the effectiveness of that style of
writing for the particular discipline.
The development of these critical reading skills is another important course goal for
English 198. In the particular class that I sat in on, the Acads were working on understanding a
scientific article in preparation to write a critical summary. The process that the Acads went
through to understand the article was a form of critical reading, guided by the instructors study
questions and facilitated by the collaboration of group members. After the Acads wrote their
critical summary, they were told to write a second major paper on the significance of the article
to a larger context, which not only asks them to understand the conversation the article
participates in but also serves as the precursor step for them one day entering into the same
conversation themselves and/or doing a similar process to participate in one in a discipline of
their own choosing. This suggests that one way to teach towards the goal of facilitating transition
from high school to college should include teaching students critical reading.
However, the class allows the students to do more than just experiment with new skills
as the Acads reported in the surveys, English 198 is a class that allows them to repurpose and
modify some of the old skills they learned in high school. The way the Acads describe
themselves sounds similar to what Reiff and Bawarshi term as boundary crosser students in
their study. The Acads talked about how their previous knowledge on how to write an essay was
changing, whether it be modifying their writing processes as a whole or parts of the fiveparagraph essay model in order to be more effective. A lot of the Acads mentioned that they were
able to do this because of the level of freedom that this class gives them in their writing
compared to previous high school classes.

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Because the ultimate goal of Acad English 198 is to prepare students for college writing
and beyond, a large component behind the workings of this course relies on transfer. What I
mean by this is that basically this class sets students up to apply the skills they learn in this class
to other similar situations. In essence, the class can be said to have succeeded when students
are able to do this. In Acad English 198, there seems to be three main opportunities for there to
be transfer. One opportunity lies in the fact that English 198 is a linked course with another
lecture class, Academy 197. The dynamic at work here is the Acads take what theyve learned in
lecture about stem cell research, learn how to assess the material using critical reading skills
theyre learning in English 198, and finally write about the material for their paper assignments,
which hopefully goes back and helps them establish their understanding of the lecture material.
In other words, English 198 teaches students the general methods as to how to assess a
discipline, and Academy 197 acts as the Acads first subject of this assessment. The end result is
that English 198 teaches students to assess science as a discipline for writing. Although I didnt
specifically test for this transfer when I designed my research project, the student responses hint
at the fact this is happening. For example, one student wrote about English 198 that a lot of time
is spent deciphering the language of science and analyzing the difference in how a scientist and
how a lay person perceive things. The class is centered around how to structure argumentation,
since the issue of stem cell research is such a controversial topic (field notes). This student has
taken what she learned in English 198 about the structure of argumentation and gone so far as to
apply that knowledge to assess the issue of stem cell research as a whole, recognizing that the
writings in this specific realm of science oftentimes center around making justifications and
addressing controversial issues.

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The second opportunity for transfer is within English 198 itself, when the course switches
materials from dealing with the ethics of scientific research to the actual research reports. This
creates an interesting dual core in the class where are students expected to understand not only
the logic of arguments in the philosophy of ethics, but also that of genre of the scientific article.
This is evident in the contrasting natures of the writing assignments that the Acads get in English
198.
Their first paper, the Acads were asked to reiterate an argument from a reading for
allowing human embryo research in the first couple weeks of the embryos life, consider
objections to this argument, and then respond to one of the said objections (field notes,
assignment prompt). This assignment deals with understanding and working with philosophical
arguments in morality. In the Acads second major paper, the assignment was to explain the
experiment detailed by a particular scientific article, focusing on explaining the research
questions involved and the conclusions the article draws (assignment prompt). The nature of this
assignment deals with the pure scientific aspect of their study on stem cell research. Its
obviously geared towards helping the Acads build a completely different skill set than the
previous assignment. However, what remained the same for both is the learning process the
Acads have to apply in order to get their understanding up to the level where they are competent
enough to write these assignments. Because the natures of the two writing assignments vary so
much in both expected writing style and discipline, my hypothesis is that doing these two
assignments in the same class by the same instructor would have allowed the Acads to build a
general sense of how approaching writing in ethics is different and/or similar to writing in
biology. The extension of this idea is that, further on in the Acads academic careers, having an

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awareness of this general method will help them learn to approach multiple other disciplines as
well. Without actual data on this though, I cannot conclude this for sure.
This being said, the third time that this course sets up transfer to occur is when the Acads
graduate from English 198 and move on to disciplines of their own choosing. Although the
extent of my research doesnt allow me to gauge whether or not the Acads actually apply what
theyve learned from this class to other classes, my data allows me to draw inferences as to what
sorts of things will transfer in the students from this class into other disciplines. As the instructor
points out, the idea is that Acads will be able to apply the process of deciphering writings in
different disciplines they learn in English 198 to other fields. Referring back to the conversation
on transfer theory, Acad English 198 actually seems to conform to Perkins and Salomons third
theory of transfer (the Good Shepard Theory), whether or not the instructor is aware of it or
not. For example, the classs focus on teaching students how to develop their sense of what
makes for effective writing in a given discipline (class syllabus) is an appropriate abstraction for
what the process of reading and breaking a text down is all about. Acads are first told what the
general principle is supposed to be, and then directed towards achieving that principle through
practice, which in this case consisted of several critical reading activities. The day I was in class
doing observations of the Acads, it was evident that they had done the type of group work they
were doing before, and the way they worked through the material felt rehearsedthe groups
knew exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing, and, according to the instructor, they
do a lot of group work that involves them making sense of difficult texts on their own. In
essence, through a process of trial and error with guidance from the instructor, the Acads learn
the principle of approaching the readings of a new and difficult discipline.

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Furthermore, simply the nature of the class in having both ethics and biology taught in
the same course helps the Acads solidify their learning on conducting critical readings of
complicated texts across different disciplines. Acads are not only taught how they can approach
complicated material to make sense of it but also exposed to a completely different discipline
within the class on which to practice these skills. In other words, they are called upon to draw out
the similarities and differences between their learning processes when dealing with ethical
arguments or scientific articles within the same class with the guidance of the same instructor to
walk them through the processes. The idea that the Acads dont have to wait until they are taking
another class on their own to try out the skills and strategies theyve been taught to use helps to
fulfill the requirement application to a new instance in the Good Shepard theory, which is what
leads me to believe that transfer in the Acad English 198 has a larger chance of being successful
since the Acads have already had a scenario where the similarities between the two tasks of
deciphering texts in ethics and biology are presented to them. This leads me to believe that
transfer from this course into other disciplines will be very likely and ultimately lead to the
Acads advantage in other classes. Whether or not this program or others similar to it actually
result in transfer is a point for further research.
Taking what Ive learned about the goal of transfer in Acad English 198, my next
question would be how the goal of transfer would look in a more general English class, since
this one tends to focus more on writings in the biological and bioethical sciences. Going back to
the larger conversation started by Downs and Wardle and continued by many others, I conclude
that one of the main components that would really help college freshman adapt to new writing
situations would be allowing them to navigate the differences between writing genres within a
single, controlled class. I agree with Downs and Wardle that teaching awareness is one of the

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things that should be taught in first year composition, but I strictly think that letting students
perform a genre analysis once is not the most effective strategy since there is no guarantee the
students will realize they can apply a genre analysis elsewhere. A writing class where the
instructor guides students through two or more different genres and is able to call upon the
students to be critically aware of how those two genres are different would have the most
effective outcome in teaching students what it means to write in college. In this sort of class,
students will be forced to navigate away from the generalized writing strategies they learned in
high school and learn how to figure out the conventions needed within specific writing
disciplines, which is important since each disciplines writing is very different and has its own
special requirements.

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Works Cited
Alsup, Janet, and Michael Bernard-Donals. The Fantasy of the Seamless Transition Teaching
Writing in High School and College. Ed. Thomas C. Thompson. Urbana: National
Council of Teachers of English, 2002. 115-35. Print.
Budden, Herb, Mary B. Nicolini, Stephen L. Fox, and Stuart Greene. What We Talk about
When We Talk about College Writing. Teaching Writing in High School and College.
Ed. Thomas C. Thompson. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002. 7393. Print.
Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions:
(Re)envisioning First-Year Composition as Introduction to Writing Studies College
Composition and Communication 58.4 (2007): 552-84. JSTOR. Web. 27 Sept. 2011.
Perkins, D.N., and Gaveriel Salomon. "The Science and Art of Transfer." Learnweb.harvard.edu.
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Perkins, David N., and Gaveriel Salomon. "Transfer of Learning." Learnweb.harvard.edu. Web.
12 Nov. 2011. <http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/docs/traencyn.htm>.
Reiff, Mary Jo, and Anis Bawarshi. Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use Prior
Genre Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition.
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Strachan, Wendy. Talking about the Transition: Dialogues between High School and University

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Teachers Teaching Writing in High School and College. Ed. Thomas C. Thompson.
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Stygall, Gail. Introduction to College Writing. Reading Context. Australia:
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