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Arum and Roksa (2011), in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, examined data on 2,300 undergraduates at 24 US institutions and found that during their first two years of college 45 percent of students demonstrated no significant improvement in a range of skills including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing; and over four years of schooling 36 percent of the students experienced no significant improvement in learning. Students majoring in business, education, social work, and communications had the lowest measurable gains. Not surprisingly, the researchers found a direct relationship between rigor and gains in learning: students whose classes reflected high expectations – more than 40 pages of reading each week and more than 20 pages of writing each semester – gained more than other students. The American Association of University Professors reported that 96.4 percent of college faculty claimed that promoting student ability to write effectively is a very important or essential goal of undergraduate education (DeAngelo et al., 2009). Teaching many fundamental skills early on is critical, and if these skills are not learned, students may be at risk for future academic failure.
Many US universities try to help their students write at the college level by establishing writing across the curriculum-based writing centers. According to Harris (1986), the majority of writing centers at the college level were started in reaction to the literacy crisis of the mid-l970s and the subsequent back-to-basics movement. Writing centers continued to sprout and expand so that, by the late-1980s, there were more than 1,000 writing centers in American and Canadian postsecondary schools (Harris, 1986). As described by Turner (2011), the institutional demand for “language centers” is recently also increasing in Europe.
We use quantitative methods to examine factors that affect the likelihood that a student visits a writing center and the impact of these visits on student success in writing and persistence in the university. In analyzing the effect of writing centers on student grades we control for student intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (as well as other external factors) improving on previous work in this area. Also, controlling for student motivation and other factors, we examine the effect at different points on student grades scale something that has never been done before in this setting.