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…

Librarians and teachers encourage students to include expert perspectives in their research, but recent public discourse includes high-profile examples of experts being inconsistent or wrong, and recent studies suggest that public trust in experts is declining. Waning trust makes it difficult to teach information literacy: I can push students to…

Most U.S. colleges and universities expect students to improve their writing ability by taking first-year composition (FYC) courses. In such courses, non-native English (L2) writers with diverse language backgrounds study alongside their native English (L1) speaking peers. However, it is not clear how different these populations are in terms of…

Dual enrollment has become an embedded aspect of our writing programs yet is still an under-researched area within rhetoric and composition. One reason for this research gap is that many DE students experience their FYC courses on secondary campuses, liminal spaces that are more difficult to access for research. DE students within these spaces…

English 299 is a two-unit credit/no credit elective, capped at fifteen students per section, intended to help first year composition students become more effective editors of their own writing. The class provides a hands-on environment to help students with sentence-level editing since the writing center on campus traditionally focuses on more…

This study focused on how self-efficacy and a student's self-assessed level of preparation for college level English impacted their success in a first-year composition course at a community college. The purpose of this study was to uncover the factors that led to successful writers with a focus on self-efficacy and collegiate writing. The research…

While plenty of literature exists that explores faculty-to-student mentorship in higher education, the bulk of this scholarship focuses on graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students, not first-year undergraduates. This is problematic as the first year of college is the one in which mentorship has the largest impact on student…

This is the first study to provide experimental evidence of the impact of corequisite remediation for students underprepared in reading and writing. We examine the short-term impacts of three different approaches to corequisite remediation that were implemented at five large urban community colleges in Texas, and we explore whether corequisites…

The developmentalist conception of information's value makes learning the central consideration for evaluating information. Following philosopher Richard Kraut, this article argues that developmentalism provides an important complement to prevalent methods of teaching the evaluation of information. These methods emphasize (a) trustworthiness--for…

While educators and librarians have long been concerned with developing undergraduates' ability to find credible sources, the abundance of unreliable information online has exponentially complicated the situation. In developing a new curriculum for English Composition 1001 classes, a first-year writing class at the University of Cincinnati, we…

This article describes the development and iterations of the English 0111 Composition Workshop-the Texas Success Initiative (TSI), at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The TSI is a program that determines college-readiness standards in reading, writing, and math. The initial structure of English 0111 was similar to the structure used in…

This paper presents assessment data from a first-year writing library partnership to examine the relationship between student source use and written synthesis. It finds that first-year students could locate peer-reviewed, scholarly sources but that these sources were poorly integrated in their arguments--if they were used at all. In contrast, it…

This research is an examination of the success rates of students in different course modalities (face-to-face, online only, and hybrid) to understand if there is a correlation between the type of interaction (synchronous or asynchronous) and student success in college composition courses. For the purpose of this study, student success is measured…

In an effort to better understand how students' length of exposure to American secondary schools relates to academic performance in core, first-year college courses, this study surveyed and analyzed the demography, study habits, and grades of 267 freshman composition (ENG 101) students at a large, urban community college. Results indicated that…

Students often ask why technical writing and literature courses are in the same department. Many students also share that technical and professional communication (TPC) courses are new to them. They are more familiar with high school literature courses and first-year composition courses. And given these experiences, they are often unsure about why…