International students represent a large portion of student populations at some higher education institutions in the United States. In response to the complexity of the student immigration process, more international students are choosing to pursue their US degrees online, while fulfilling their personal and professional obligations in their home…

The debate around student personal essays has dissipated in recent scholarship, though it still remains a highly contested subject. This dissertation study examines three main criticisms surrounding student personal essays from the theorists James Berlin, Lester Faigley, and David Bartholomae. These critiques are that students don't attend to…

As access to higher education has continuously risen throughout the second half of the twentieth century, community college student success has not kept pace. Within this climate, institutions look to cost-effective initiatives and programs to encourage student success in order to produce more certificate and degree earners. While many first-year…

This dissertation explores student perceptions of effective teaching strategies in a developmental writing course and their perspectives of how well the course prepared them for the freshman college composition course. Three research questions guided the study. Research Question 1 asked which teaching strategies developmental writing students…

This dissertation looks at computer programming through the lens of literacy studies, building from the concept of code as a written text with expressive and rhetorical power. I focus on the intersecting technological and social factors of computer code writing as a literacy--a practice I call "proceduracy". Like literacy, proceduracy is a human…