Reflections on the Missouri CWA Surveys, 1989-2001: A New Composition Delivery Paradigm

Since 1989, the Missouri Colloquium on Writing Assessment (CWA) has conducted, compiled, and published the results of thirteen annual writing surveys completed by writing program administrators at Missouri's two-year and four-year institutions (primarily public) as well as at Johnson County Kansas Community College, a part of the Kansas City metropolitan area. In all, thirty-seven different colleges and universities (nineteen two-year and eighteen four-year institutions) are represented in the thirteen years of survey results, with eight institutions included in all thirteen surveys and twenty-seven (72 percent) of the colleges and universities participating eight or more survey years (see Tables 1 and 2).1 The collected data are unique in that the same cohort of schools responded to the same detailed inquiries related to the assessing, curricular design, delivery, and staffing of general studies writing courses. An examination of the re