YOU CLICKED: WEEK'S MOST POPULAR EDUCATION STORIES 1: Colleges entering 'difficult financial times' 2: Where they stand: McCain, Obama split on education 3: Florida school may drop Confederate general's name 4: New rules require states, schools to reduce dropouts 5: Students, schools adjust for struggling economy 6: 6 teens charged in school football hazing No. 7-10: Student loans, trading cards Yahoo! Buzz Digg Newsvine Reddit FacebookWhat's this?By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY It's pretty hard to get through college without ever having to compose a paper. Now, the National Survey of Student Engagement puts a number on just how much students write: • 92 pages on average for first-year students. • 146 pages on average for seniors. • 114 for seniors studying the physical sciences. • 172 for seniors studying the social sciences. FIND MORE STORIES IN: University of New Mexico | National Survey of Student Engagement POOR PREPARATION: Collegians 'get away' with it, survey finds NSSE: Assessing undergraduate experience FACULTY: Mentors and models AT AUGUSTANA COLLEGE: Faculty members rethink their roles But enough about quantity. The real story is that good writing assignments are definitely a good thing. When courses provide extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the NSSE report found, students engage in a variety of positive activities. They are more likely to analyze, synthesize and integrate ideas from various sources. They grapple more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. And they report greater personal, social, practical and academic development. Those findings provide "solid evidence that writing in college is associated with the kinds of learning that professors and higher-education institutions say they believe is most significant," says Chuck Paine, a University of New Mexico English professor and member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. The council worked with NSSE to develop a report on writing released today. The report draws from three studies: NSSE's national survey conducted this spring of more than 380,000 first-year and senior students on 722 four-year campuses, a more detailed NSSE survey of 23,000 students on 82 of those campuses, and a survey of about 23,000 faculty on 160 campuses that asks questions related to the student surveys. Among findings: • Faculty who encourage writing multiple drafts are also likely to emphasize approaches to learning that call on students to think critically and reflect on their learning. • The most common writing tasks were to analyze something or argue a position. Writing about numerical data was less common. • More than half of faculty assigned more than 25 pages of writing in their senior course sections. But individual assignments for freshmen and seniors tend to be shorter in length. [from another article' In 2006, fewer freshmen reported that they were asked to memorize facts, ideas or methods, and more freshmen reported that they were asked to synthesize and organize ideas, information or experiences into new, more complex interpretations and relationships. Similarly, freshmen in 2006 reported that they were writing more longer papers than freshmen in 2003. And significantly more freshmen in 2006 said they had been asked to make a class presentation than did freshmen in 2003.