Abstract

The Brainard Writing Center strives to better its practices in terms of scheduling tutors, assisting with certain academic divisions, and addressing key writing issues. In working closely with the online scheduling system for the Center, this researcher noticed issues in tutor scheduling that resulted in less availability for clients to use the organization’s resources. There was limited tutor knowledge in regards to discerning which academic divisions were most represented in clients’ papers. Finally, the tutors desired to learn which writing issues were most discussed in sessions so that they could best prepare to address those issues with future cliental. This researcher aspired to further investigate these topics in order to advance the availability and preparedness of the Center’s tutors.

The research conducted addresses these items by analyzing the Brainard Writing Center data over the past three years with statistical analysis tools, including the chi-square test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and Test of Hypothesis, One Proportion. The results of this research conclude the need to modify the center’s schedule, increase tutor training on the subject matter of the Western Heritage class, and keep tutors up to date in terms of sentence level concern writing issues. The result have already impacted the scheduling in the Center, as the Director of the Writing Center has allocated three tutors to work during the hours of 12pm-4pm for the Spring 2014 semester.