WORDS BY…Brett Bergstrom & Griffin Day
We have found ourselves acutely interested by our class’s theoretical probing of spatial relations in the writing center, especially given the current “in-flux” conditions of UNL’s writing culture. Our potential research project’s brief proposal follows.
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Research Hypothesis
The location of the tutoring session, either alone with a tutor in a private space or with a tutor in a public space, will affect the likelihood of a student returning for another session.
Prediction
We predict that the type of tutoring space provided for a given writing center session does indeed impact whether or not the tutee in question will return; our analysis looks to keep in mind theory frameworks such as rhetorical space and postmodern geography, through which we hope to pay “attention to the connections between spaces and practices” so that we might establish a link between “the material conditions to the activities of particular spaces” and thus explore the consequence of a space and its coding in relation to the likelihood a tutee returns (from p29, McKinney’s “Writing Centers are Cozy Homes”)
Methodology
Randomly assign tutees to one of two experimental conditions: private space or public space. Students will be assigned by flipping a coin before their session. We hope to ask permission from one tutor to partake in the experiment such that we can maintain ongoing procedural equivalence that would be lost otherwise. If at all possible, we would only include students who have never been to the writing center before as taken from a sample of all students who schedule a session. The selected sample is intended to represent the collegiate student body in seek of tutoring assistance as a whole. Due to potential restrictions on availability within the sampling frame, we seek to include 10 male and 10 female participants as an effort to gain control of the procedural variables. A survey would be conducted after the tutoring session that asks for the participant’s grade, major, assignment observed during the session, first language, and five mark scale that ranks overall comfort, enjoyment, quality, and effectiveness of the given session.
Given that there is an innumerable amount of variables within the writing center (year, gender, major, etc.) we are looking to focus primarily on the external validity, or generalizability, of the experiment over procedural control. However, we believe that the unpredictable nature of the writing center justifies our claim to infer causality and ultimately can be applied to other tutoring centers.
Writing Centers, Writing Theory, and English 480 
This is an interesting proposal that takes advantage of the Writing Center’s current location. Some questions:
1. Were you hoping to share this research beyond the class? If so, you would definitely need IRB approval, and we’d need to get you started on obtaining that ASAP.
2. For ethical reasons, you’d need to think carefully about your approach to this. There needs to be a way for participants to opt out, if they don’t want to be in either space. And even if you want to do this as a class project without IRB approval, there’s the problem of consent: how would you gain the writer’s permission? What would you disclose about the study at that time? Also, do you know of a consultant who would be willing to participate in the experiment?
I’m not trying to be discouraging here; just need to consider a lot of factors to figure out if this study is feasible (or how to make it so).
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