Portfolio+synthesis+example

Foundations of College Writing Dr. Sherry Portfolio Synthesis Letter Chira Husky

This semester, in Foundations of College Writing, I have worked toward five goals for my writing. Below, I list each of these goals and provide examples of how I have made progress toward them. I draw my examples mainly from the three projects we did: in the first project, I researched an aspect of college culture by reading other studies and collecting interview and observation data; in the second project, I transformed the results of my research into three different genres for three different audiences; in the third project, I wrote a personal narrative about my own experiences related to the same topic and about the main focus of the course—what it means to be educated.


 * Goal** ** A. Students will be able to compose for particular audiences and purposes. **

In my research project, I investigated how mathematics instruction differs from high school to college and how students and teachers in both places perceive that instruction. When I wrote my professional conference presentation slideshow, my audience was fellow researchers, and my purpose was to extend and challenge the existing research in this area. I did this in my slideshow by first including previous research and explaining how it informed the design of my own interviews/observations and also the analysis of my data.

I used this approach because it is shows an audience of Social Science researchers that I know how to build on others’ studies in order to design my own study and analyze my data. In my second project, I transformed the results of my research into a magazine article for teachers about how students learn math in different ways and how important it is to differentiate instruction. Because this audience and purpose differed from my research paper, I used a much different organization. INSERT MAG ARTICLE Instead of including background from other research and a description of my methods, which only researchers would be interested in, I described the problem and then used key quotes from one teacher. For example, I wrote, “’Students learn in all different ways, and you have to provide for each way,’ says Jeff Stover, a math teacher for 25 years, ‘You can't do the same thing every day. The most effective teachers use a combination of techniques.’ Stover continues to explain how he tries to incorporate different styles in the way they practice problems during class.”Instead of relating this data back to other research, I gave concrete activities that practicing teachers would want to use, like including visuals and pictures or in-class time for practice problems. In this way, I transformed the results of my first project, which was meant to extend previous research for other researchers, into a magazine article for an audience of fellow teachers who might be more interested in practical applications.


 * B. Students will be able to compose using language **** and conventions appropriate to genre. **

For my research project, I chose to create a professional presentation of the kind I might present at a research conference. Even though the genre I used was not a paper, I still used the same conventions of a Social Science research article. For example, I first stated the Problem I would focus on, then I gave Background from previous research, next I explained how my Methods drew on that previous research, and finally, I analyzed my data and drew some conclusions. For example, I wrote:

A review of previous research is something that stands out as particular to the Social Science research genre. I also cited the previous research using APA style, which gives the author and the date to show how current the research is. This example shows that I am able to use the conventional headings of the Social Science research article in a way that is appropriate to that genre and recognizable to a researcher audience.
 * This is not the first study on student-teacher interaction. In her study, //My Freshman Year,// Dr. RebekahNathan, a professor for 15 years, decided to study college life by enrolling as a student at her own university.
 * Chapter 4 of //My Freshman Year// focused on international students and how they viewed American culture. Nathan asked the international students about teachers, and this is what she found:
 * **Quote:** “U.S. professors were described by different international students as ‘laid-back,’ ‘helpful,’ ‘open,’ ‘tolerant’ (of scant clothing and sleeping in class), ‘casual,’ and ‘friendly,” (Nathan, 2005, pg. 78).