Learning assistance is a relatively new idea in education in the United States since most learning centers have come into existence since 1970. Although developmental education has become accessible in remote areas and many financial and psychological barriers have been lifted, much more could be accomplished in this area if more evaluative…

The presence of academically underprepared students at Vassar College from 1865 to 1890 and at Cornell University from 1868 to 1890 was a source of controversy in both institutions. Vassar took on the burden of providing for comprehensive preparatory education for academically-deficient students within the context of the college. Cornell, although…

A program designed to provide field based experience to students of education by engaging them in tutoring activities in elementary schools is described. This direct first-hand teaching experience is offered at the sophomore level of college. One important feature of the program is the control that each child's teacher has over the tutoring…

The Teacher/Tutor Room (TTR) was created by the Special Services staff at Coweeman Junior High School (Kelso, Washington) to provide academic support for their "special needs" students in the least restrictive environment without giving them an obvious label or stigmatizing them by putting them in a special class. Students who need…

Freshman and sophomore composition students who are required to write in response to literature frequently find that they are not yet secure enough in their basic writing skills to discuss a literary work. In order to help these students, writing center tutors must be familiar with the assigned writing tasks and what instructors expect from an…

A tutoring program has been developed for the purpose of teaching reading to secondary school students seriously deficient in reading skills. The first section of this paper describes the highly structured instructional program that is employed. It also notes preliminary results of the tutoring, which indicate that 17 of the 25 students tested…

The need to develop students' critical thinking skills is examined in this paper, along with existing academic support services, federal regulations and requirements, data on minority group students, and measures of program effectiveness. Many programs provide tutorial services to help the student meet the demands of coursework and to increase…

Until recently, the conventional wisdom about the conjunction of peer tutoring and writing in the disciplines was that a tutor unfamiliar with subject matter actually operated at an advantage. In spite of some of the theoretical advantages of ignorance, recent research suggests that it is difficult to ask probing questions and make useful…

Addressing a variety of concerns of writing center directors and staff, directors of freshman composition, and English department chairs, the papers in this collection discuss writing center research and evaluation, writing center tutors, and computers in the writing center. The titles of the essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "Narrative…

Open admissions as an educational policy in higher education depends upon the success of remediation programs in English and especially in composition courses. Because so many English majors will spend part of all of their professional lives teaching, their training at both the undergraduate and graduate levels should prepare them for teaching,…

A study compared the perceptions of remedial optometry students concerning themselves, cognitive strategies used in studying, the studying and evaluation processes, and study habits with their tutors' perceptions. Two predominant problems emerged: the extent of responsibility of the student in academic difficulty and discrepancies in tutor/tutee…

The investigation of peer response groups in a basic college writing class was one method of charting the development of students' writing skills over the span of a semester to see if collaborative learning was beneficial to the writing process. Response groups were tape-recorded and observed, and members were interviewed. By the fourth week of…

This paper addresses the problem of how a community college writing center can maintain its personalized character as it moves toward online resources and approaches. The authors describe a writing resource developed by the Writing Center at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY) by LaGuardia and CUNY faculty and…

Eight New Jersey State colleges which shared essentially the same goals and offered similar financial aid packages were studied in order to determine the relationship between persistence rates of disadvantaged students in opportunity programs and the role of faculty in such programs. Student data were provided by New Jersey's Equal Opportunity…

This study investigated the effects of a study skills course combined with or without class-specific tutoring, and whether or not faculty would be able to observe differences in behavior of high risk students as a result of student participation in the two different levels of intervention. Students (n=22) in the College Skills Development Program…