First-year courses prepare students for the transition to, and success in, college. Institutions are interested in assessing student learning outcomes to achieve institutional goals and maintain accreditation. Though it may be difficult to measure student learning and success, colleges aim to assess student learning in the classroom by setting…

Strong arguments have been forwarded for embedding academic writing development into the UK higher education curriculum and for subject tutors to facilitate this development (Hyland, 2000; Lea & Street, 2006; Monroe, 2003; Wingate, 2006). This small-scale case study explores subject tutors' practices and beliefs with regard to the provision of…

Concern about the research and writing abilities of undergraduate students led to the development, implementation and enhancement of four sequential writing assignments in an introductory course. These writing assignments--which included a report on an interview of a professional in the field, a research paper on an aspirational career, a research…

Providing effective feedback on writing is a challenge in any learning environment, but it is even more problematic in fully online instruction. The lack of face-to-face interaction in web-based classes increases the need for highly transparent, prompt, and personalized feedback. Student views on the use of a semi-structured template combined with…

This action research combined qualitative and quantitative techniques to investigate two different types of writing assignments in an introductory undergraduate statistics course. The assignments were written in response to the same set of prompts but in two different ways: homework journal assignments or initial posts to a computer discussion…