Like many of its contemporaries across the state, North Central Texas College's (NCTC) English and math faculty were committed to the promise of corequisite education and its students' success as outlined by the Dana Center, but they also understood the obstacles to implementing, assessing, and scaling its corequisite courses. NCTC's English and…

It has been twenty-seven years since a small group of faculty at the Community College of Baltimore County, faced with the discovery that two-thirds of students placed in our upper-level basic writing course never passed first year composition, began the development of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), one of the earliest corequisite…

Institutional assessment initiatives can provide opportunities to make the intellectual work of teaching and learning in composition studies more visible. Reciprocally, the scholarship of teaching and learning's situatedness within disciplinary norms and values can enhance institutional assessments, providing a check on the tendency to rely…

What lasting impact could a required general education writing course have on students' well-being? The authors examined this question in the context of the California State University- Chico Town Hall Meeting, a campus event sponsored jointly by the Academic Writing Program and the First-Year Experience Program from 2006 to 2009. In the Town…

In a FIPSE-funded assessment project, a group of diverse institutions collaborated on developing a common, course-embedded approach to assessing student writing in our first-year writing programs. The results of this assessment project, the processes we developed to assess authentic student writing, and individual institutional perspectives are…

Explains how faculty at Quinnipiac College reconceptualized developmental English and designed a new program that provides additional instructional time within the regular freshman English course. Finds that developmental students are better motivated and achieve growth in reading and writing commensurate with students who had a prior semester of…

Updates an earlier report to underscore the inadvisability of imposing large sections of freshman composition students on reluctant departments and to promote further discussion of the issues raised by the program. Discusses some of the more controversial implications raised by the program. (RS)

This paper describes the First Year Program at Westminster College in Pennsylvania, which has implemented a new, progressive curriculum that prominently features the basic communication course, and an initial attempt to evaluate the program. The paper begins with a description of the content and goals of the basic communication course, which is…

Discusses principles about writing instruction that emerged from mainstreaming basic writers in first-year composition at California State University, Chico: (1) students learn college writing by being in the context of college writing, not some other context; and (2) literacy learning does not come in discreet levels. Describes how writers in…