This paper reports the findings of a study of student writing that assessed the skill needs of a cohort of developmental writing students enrolled in a co-requisite composition course at a community college that is part of the City University of New York (CUNY). This credit-bearing course fulfills the first half of the required composition…

Over a century ago, rhetoricians called on writing instructors in the U.S. to accept and even encourage language diversity among learners. Yet scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies are still advocating for this via arguments for linguistic justice and translingualism, even referring to strict adherence to a single, mainstream…

Community colleges have transitioned from traditional developmental course sequences to accelerated corequisite remediation models to provide students with an expedited pathway to college-level courses. This study was designed to compare the mean percentage of passes for participants enrolled in 4 and 6-contact hour corequisite English courses.…

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 purpose of this quantitative, ex post facto study was to determine if there was a significant difference in course pass and withdrawal rates between online community college synchronous and asynchronous introductory English composition (IEC) courses. The community of inquiry provided the theoretical foundation for the study. The research…

The problem with Black male persistence and retention on the community college level is largely presented from a deficit perspective. Even though the causes include multiple factors, such as deficits in literacy and mathematics, and lack of preparation on the K-12 level, first-year writing is also a major stumbling block to persistence. These…

Background: Upon returning to in-person teaching at Kingsborough Community College after the pandemic, I realized something profound had shifted in my students. The well-documented drop in community college enrollment attributed to the pandemic seemed to reflect deeper disjunctures that had led students to an existential questioning of the purpose…

"Mattering" is a key component of success for students (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981). For community college students, the classroom plays a critical role in their college experience because community college students spend most of their time on campus (Lundberg, 2014). Among college courses, first-year writing classes hold…

This paper presents a qualitative study that used student interviews to investigate the influence of non-cognitive barriers on developmental student success in a corequisite first-year composition course that was offered on line following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students answered open-ended questions about their previous educational…

More community college professors are replacing expensive commercial textbooks with no-cost open educational resources (OER) to help make college more affordable for their students. With students having no financial reason to delay or forgo textbook purchases, many instructors also expect OER adoption will lead to improvements in academic outcomes…

Incorporating instructor continuity into the first-year composition (FYC) sequence represents an opportunity for community colleges to make an informed scheduling and advising decision in order to assist in the goal to increase student success rates in FYC. Utilizing course completion data from a community college in northern Alabama, this study…

Developmental English (DE) has been under fire from critics who think it acts as a barrier rather than as a support to the success of students placing into DE. In Texas, such pressures led to a wave of reforms and changes affecting delivery and structure of DE instruction. This dissertation draws on years of internal data at one community college…

This research attempted to determine whether faculty instructors' employment status played a role in the success of students who are not college ready. The purpose of this study was to determine whether developmental English faculty instructors' employment status had an effect on grades in a freshman composition course (English 101) among…

The purpose of this study was to measure to what extent an experimental method of teaching argument incorporating elements from both Toulmin's (2004) structural approach and Walton's (2013) dialectical approach effects first-year college students' ability to write strong arguments. This experimental instruction used critical questioning as a…

Instructors of first-year composition (FYC) face the challenge of crafting rhetorically diverse opportunities for student writers within a classroom setting. As a result, many have embraced service-learning or community-engaged pedagogy. Oral history projects may be incorporated into curricula by faculty who embrace this approach to teaching, but…