This article examines a mentoring initiative that embedded advanced students in first-year composition courses to mentor students to excel to the best of their abilities. Mentors attended all classes along with students and conducted many out-of-class individual conferences, documenting each of them using programimplemented work logs. Four hundred…

Composition teachers have generally embraced collaborative learning in the years since Kenneth Bruffee published his first article promoting its advantages in "College English" in 1972. But assigning collaboratively written papers in an introductory college writing course is still rare. This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a…

Evaluation of freshman English programs is a process involving recursive steps, such as planning which elements to review, securing resources to carry out the review, actually reviewing the planned elements, and providing written reports to decision-makers. The four elements of an educational program--contexts, input, process, and product--cohere…

In summer 1990, the English Department of the Metropolitan Community College District (MCCD) in Missouri conducted a self-study to determine whether the English program's subject matter, academic standards, and methods of instruction were consistent with objectives. An Evaluation Committee, consisting of three English instructors representing each…