This study discusses a writing assessment for State University’s first year integrated experience of Technology 120: Design Thinking in Technology and English 106: First-Year Writing and the implications it provides for curriculum design. The study used Adaptive Comparative Judgment to determine whether integrated research essays that utilized design thinking were more rhetorically effective (i.e., better attuned to addressing a purpose, audience, and context) than non-integrated English composition research essays. Results showed the non-integrated research essays had a statistically significant better rating than the integrated courses; this finding was counterintuitive to our expectations, therefore we utilized NVivo to conduct a word frequency analysis on judges’ holistic comments to determine strengths and weaknesses of the essays. The word frequency analysis demonstrated writing concepts were much stronger and more effective in a standard composition course. These findings led to the development of three literature-based curriculum and pedagogical changes to ensure that integrated students achieve general education writing outcomes in concert with design thinking principles—something our results showed as lacking significantly in these courses.

本研究讨论了针对州立大学第一年技术综合课程120：技术中的设计思维和英语106：第一年写作的写作评估，以及其对课程设计的启示。该研究使用自适应比较判断法来确定采用设计思维的综合研究论文是否比非综合英语作文研究论文在言辞上更有效（即，更好地针对目标，受众和语境）。结果表明，非综合性研究论文在统计学上比综合性课程具有更好的评分；这一发现与我们的预期背道而驰，因此我们利用NVivo对法官的整体评论进行了词频分析，以确定论文的优缺点。词频分析表明写作概念在标准写作课程中更强大，更有效。这些发现导致开发了三种基于文学的课程，并对教学法进行了更改，以确保融合的学生能够根据设计思维原理获得通识教育写作的成果-我们的结果表明，这些课程明显缺乏这些东西。