ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the parallel implications for higher education research. It considers more broadly the implications for all of those whose work in some way connects with student writing, including academics teaching in the disciplines like those who are at the centre of this research. The chapter focuses on the question of value – of what is valued by individual teachers but even more powerfully by the institutions which employ them and the higher education sector more broadly. The evidence of this study is that nurturing individual teachers' personal investment in student writing development is a task for higher education developers as well as for quality assurance managers. Higher education research can feed into and support more productively non-judgemental approaches by adopting particular methodologies to try to get at what is 'going on' with student writing at university. However, the study has shown that in UK higher education at least, the disciplines are not always hospitable places for such work.
