This participatory action research (PAR) dissertation study investigates the implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles by community college faculty in first-year writing courses to support students with learning disabilities at a New Jersey community college. Through a collaborative approach involving faculty as active…

The initial composition course in the community college has the potential to be a transformative space for the identity formation of adult learners towards the linguistic signifier of "scholar." Freshman students of variable ages enter a new culture which demands the negotiation of an alternative academic language, an adaptation to the…

This article presents the results of a 2016 classroom research study assessing the impact of open pedagogy on student skills mastery in English 101, a first-year undergraduate composition course at a two-year community college in North America. Ninety-two students in five sections used the same free OER course materials, but two sections were…

This paper will give a step-by-step demonstration on how to create MP4 files to video-grade undergraduate writing assignments. The process of using prepared rubrics to guide video and audio feedback will be presented and examples shown. This assessment method provides students with personalized video-feedback as a re-usable learning object. The…

In the fall of 2009, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) initiated a series of research programs designed to support the high school reform program, "Excellence for All," based on more than 20 years of research on the school reform programs of the countries with the most successful education programs worldwide. A…

Multimodal writing is considered as a "new" way of composing, or, somewhat cynically, as a strategy for adding relevance or interest to a required composition course. Jody Shipka's "A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing" suggests that "students' uptakes of a much wider, richer repertoire of semiotic resources,…

How students respond to teacher-written commentary has been an under-researched topic, and the existing literature in L2 studies is contradictory. The present study analyzes the critical and positive commentary, mitigated and unmitigated, written by two community-college, first-year composition teachers on two drafts of two writing assignments…

At the University of Akron, the administration decided to segregate the students previously called "provisional" from the "regular" population. As an open-access institution, the university directly admits only approximately 15 percent of the students to a program of study. The vast majority of students start in University College and transfer to…

Shows how to make room in the first-year composition course for unusual writings using collective research. Contains a narrative explaining how students devise their own topics and conduct their research in groups. (TB)

Describes two cross-cultural composition courses offered at Valencia Community College using international readers and foreign films to help students gain insight on non-American cultures while learning about their own culture. Offers examples of reading and film worksheets, and discusses textbooks and assignments (e.g., student journals and…

By applying the principles of total quality management (TQM), freshman composition can be taught in a way that focuses on the customer (the student), engenders a willingness for continuous improvement, builds quality into the process of writing, empowers the student to become responsible for his/her work, and allows students to make the necessary…

For an educator who teaches English in a multicultural setting, the best way to accommodate marked features of African-American vernacular English (AAVE) in black students' freshman essays is to preserve these features in teaching students narrative writings and guide African-American students to avoid these features in expository (academic)…