Students as Scholars & Writers: Teaching & Assessing Undergraduate Writing in a Capstone Course

This paper presents an innovative approach for engaging and assessing undergraduate students in the writing process. Through an iterative, intensive course design that includes both in-classroom and online teaching, our Capstone course integrates writing instruction as students learn a new topic, gather and analyze data, and write a research paper complete with an introduction, literature review, findings section, and discussion/conclusion. Based on five semesters of observations, survey data, content analysis, and student reflective writing, we discuss the processes students undergo while learning to research and write as social science scholars. We find student outcomes beyond what we initially expected.