In 1987 Harvard University conducted a detailed survey of 365 students. Their goal was to find out more about how students related to their courses and to look for patterns between the various components of undergraduate classes. They asked four questions of each student about the classes they were enrolled in during that semester:

                    --What is your total weekly time commitment to the class?

                    --To what extent do you find the class intellectually challenging?

• The strongest relationship was between the amount of writing and the level of engagement: The more writing the students were assigned, the more personally engaged they were with the course.

• There was also a very strong relationship between the amount of writing assigned in the course and the students’ sense of the intellectual challenge of the course.

• The amount of time students spent on the course increased in relation to how much writing was assigned. 

• The amount of time students spent on the course increased in relation to what kinds of papers were assigned. In courses with one 20-page research paper at the end, students reported spending 8.5 hours a week on course work. In courses assigning four 5-page papers, students reported committing 12 hours a week to the class.

On the subject of writing improvement

The Harvard study also explored why some students were able to improve their writing while others were not. Interviewing students, teachers, and outside evaluators of the papers they found that two things impeded students’ improvement: "(1) misinterpretation of teachers’ comments on their essays, and (2) lack of specific strategies for revising essays. Students whose writing improves the most overcome both of these obstacles by implementing specific actions suggested by their teachers" (Bushey, cited in "Harvard Assessment of Writing" p. 39).

This leads to two suggestions: