There is an increasing need of gerontological education in social work to enhance the knowledge of aging and interests in senior care among students. This study is conducted based on an experiential-learning strategy with a combination of having an ethnographic interview with an older adult and writing a reflection paper afterward as an assignment…

Teachers' instructional practices surrounding written assignments have been little researched, despite writing remaining the primary means of assessment in higher education, including postgraduate professional development programmes. In this paper, we report a study that explored what a sample of lecturers in a Master of Education programme at an…

Students who are quiet while reflecting on information before sharing their thoughts are often mistakenly judged as not participating in class. To better understand how quiet students navigated the space of a Midwestern U.S. suburban classroom, a yearlong action research study was conducted to learn more about student needs and test how adapting…

This article shares a study of an interview/writing project for adolescent girls, which was a component of the Girls Writing Science Project at a diverse urban high school in the Southwestern United States. The group of high school girls planned, initiated, conducted, and wrote interview profiles of women scientists from their local community.…

We argue that the literature on critical thinking in sociology has conflated two different skill sets: critical sociological thinking and higher-level thinking. To begin to examine how sociologists weigh and cultivate these skill sets, we interviewed 20 sociology instructors and conducted a content analysis of 26 assignments. We found that while…

In this article, we detail our findings from a case study of three instructors as they newly implemented service-learning pedagogies into their first year writing classes. Drawing on the instructors' perspectives as part of a larger programmatic assessment, we demonstrate that a service-learning curriculum can broadly foster learning outcomes for…

This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent's writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory…

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers' understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving…

Drawing on fieldwork, this article examines nursing students' design and use of a patient health record during clinical simulations, where small teams of students provide nursing care for a robotic patient. The student-designed patient health record provides a compelling example of how simulation genres can both authentically coordinate action…

In order to benefit from feedback on their writing, students need to engage effectively with it. This article reports a case study on student engagement with computer-generated feedback, known as automated writing evaluation (AWE) feedback, in an EFL context. Differing from previous studies that explored commercially available AWE programs, this…

This article explores the learning experiences of two students in the same college-level English course at Urban Serving Community College (USCC) (pseudonym). The objective was to understand how one student met with success and the other failure despite both successfully completing their developmental English course the semester prior. I observed…

Student voice is a difficult concept to capture in research. This study attempts to provide a vehicle for understanding student perceptions about writing and writing instruction through a case study supported by discourse analysis of student talk. The high school students in this study participated in interviews and focus groups about their…

This study examines how interpretations of mentoring by trainee mentors (TMs) changed over the course of a mentor training programme, and how this contributed to the TMs' professional development. The context of the study was a mentor training programme for preschool teachers who mentor early childhood teacher students during their practicums.…

We conducted a study to examine how a writing-to-learn assignment influenced student learning of polymer behavior. In particular, we examined the role of specific content and a rhetorical framework as well as a structured writing process including peer review and revision. The student-generated writing was analyzed via a content-directed rubric.…

This paper is focused on an innovation which involved students being assessed on short written responses to an issue to be addressed in the following classroom session. The innovation was evaluated through a student survey, individual and focus-group interviews with participants, and the analysis of a critical friend. Positive findings included…