Students who are interested in understanding the relationship between teaching and learning, including students who are interested in pursuing a career in education (at any level--from preschool through college, and in any role--from counselor to teacher to administrator) as well as students who would like to examine the principles and practices embodied in education at Evergreen, are welcome to apply to join this research group. Students will develop their abilities to identify, analyze and synthesize studies related to the research questions. Students will also have opportunities to design individual or collaborative research projects related to the group’s research questions.

We will function as a collaborative research group, and our focus will be on understanding how students develop as writers at an interdisciplinary liberal arts college with no required writing classes. We will examine early studies of student writing at Evergreen and current studies of students’ development as writers at colleges across the U.S. We will also review literature on the nature of disciplinary and interdisciplinary understanding. Based on our collective review, we will develop research questions and design research studies that will allow us to probe a variety of topics including the following:

• The role of motivation in writing development
• The effects of social interaction on learning
• The development of disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise
• The effects of reflection and narrative evaluations
• The impacts of assignments and teacher feedback
• The nature of “transfer”—applying learning from one setting to another
• The nature of writing development in a digital age

Students who participate in this group for the whole year will have opportunities to develop their own research projects related to teaching and learning. Students may choose to organize their work so that it culminates in submissions to peer-reviewed national journals like Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric.