A common practice in writing centers is to record the events of a tutoring session after it has occurred. Commonly written by tutors, “session notes” can be a useful resource for the day-to-day support work in which tutors engage. Currently, however, little research exists on how session notes can be used to measure tutor development and change over time. Instead, research focuses predominantly how particular audiences interact with session notes, rather than the linguistic content therein. This study addresses the gap in research between the conceptual and practical uses of session notes. The researchers implemented semesterly training modules for tutors, and then conducted a longitudinal discourse analysis of 1,261 session notes that were collected over six semesters. Session notes were coded for 12 variables to include behavioral, semantic, and affective reflections on writing center work. From this analysis, we were able to conceptualize how, in completing these forms, tutors describe their tutoring practice and demonstrate their tutoring knowledge. Findings show that, for many aspects of note taking, a semester of experience has an effect on tutors, such that they start to conform on note taking practices; however, specific trainings can change the behavior of experienced tutors.

Two long-standing assumptions on which writing centers operate are that individual tutoring helps students’ writing development and that the actual talk of such tutoring enables such development (Bruffee, 1984; Lunsford, 1991; Gillespie & Lerner, 2008; Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2015). Questions, long thought of as one of the most important pedagogical tools, enable writing tutors to tap into students’ knowledge of writing, help them clarify the writing task, advance their thoughts, and advise them indirectly on how to proceed further. Whereas writing center lore has emphasized the importance of questioning in non-directive tutorials, scholars have only recently begun to explore empirically tutors’ actual use of questions more generally in tutorials, the differentiated functions of questions, and the strategic use of questions in tutorial discourse (Thompson & Mackiewicz, 2014).In this study we present an original, empirical scheme for coding question types in writing tutorials derived from 15 writing tutorial sessions in our own corpus of the genre. We apply this functionally oriented scheme to one typical session to show how questions operate locally, how they are distributed across a session, as well as how they achieve both pedagogical and organizational goals within such interactions. The use of questions in this tutorial is compared with question use in 14 other sessions to discover patterns in tutors’ questioning behavior. Our findings provide insight into how tutors’ strategic use of particular question types can empower students to become more active participants in the tutorial.

Adaptive help seeking and self-efficacy have been examined extensively over the last 20 years, but few studies have investigated their role in writing center tutoring, which has become an important component of process-oriented writing instruction. Using data collected over an 8-year period, this study analyzes the effect of writing self-efficacy (assessed using established self-efficacy scales) and help-seeking behavior (measured by frequency of writing center visitation) on writing performance as measured by composition grades. Participants were 671 undergraduates, approximately half of whom were international students for whom English was a second or third language. Data analyses showed an inverse correlation between self-efficacy and help-seeking behavior. In addition, high levels of help-seeking behavior resulted in better performance in composition classes, especially for the ESL participants; indeed, this behavior was the strongest predictor of success.