The European Writing Survey (EUWRIT): Background, Structure, Implementation, and Some Results
Mădălina Chitez, Otto Kruse, Montserrat Castelló · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · 2015
The European Writing Survey (EUWRIT), both the student and faculty versions, reflects the need to systematically gather data on student writing in various institutional and disciplinary contexts. The final version of the survey (status January 2015) includes questions on: personal and demographic data, general questions on writing in the study programme, writing process and feedback, text genres and writing practices, self-evaluation (students) and appreciation (faculty) of the writing skills, conceptions of “good writing”, study competences and writing support. EUWRIT is the result of a long testing and implementation process, which started in 2006. The range of projects in which the survey has been im-plemented is broad and includes assessment of writing skills in study programmes (Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich; Economics, Journalism and Health at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences), investigations of different stages of student development (Translation Studies at Zurich University of Ap-plied Sciences); comparisons of writing cultures (universities of teacher education in the French, German, and Italian parts of Switzerland); assessments of writing cultures in certain disciplines at different universities (Spain); studies of the writing cultures of a single university (University of Constance, Germany); and comparisons of the genres in different Eastern Europe countries (Macedonia, Romania, Ukraine). The report gives a synthesis of the construction principles of the EUWRIT questionnaire and presents some of the results from the aforementioned studies.