Despite a rapid growth in student interest, the Rhetoric and Composition minor at the College of the Holy Cross faces staffing challenges due to its placement in an interdisciplinary center but reliance on faculty lines in English. In an attempt to address these challenges, we sought to develop a new gateway course to the minor that was deeply…

This dissertation reports on research conducted to better understand how college student writers learned to work against their own biases as they researched and wrote arguments. I conducted a review of former studies to design a curriculum that would help students avoid bias and increase their ability to write arguments tailored to specific…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the challenges students face in academic writing as well as explore the possible causes of their writing challenges which could be based on their socio-cultural background. The primary research design is a hermeneutical phenomenological study which describes and interprets lived experience. There are…

This case study investigated first-year composition students' perceptions of instructors' written feedback. Participants reported on their understanding of the role of feedback, how they processed feedback, and if and how they used it. Thirty-one participants completed a short online survey; the responses were analyzed to identify students who…

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…

This project discusses the creation and implementation of labor logs in multimodal curricula in two levels of writing courses and how these labor logs support students' development of meta-awareness through reflection-in-action (Yancey, 1998). Labor logs create a space for students to focus on in the moment recognition, or monitoring, of what…

This dissertation compares the impact of instructor screencast feedback and instructor written feedback on the writing of college students in freshman composition courses. A mixed methods study was used to assess the level of improvement between drafts of essays, the final scores of essays, and the level of improvement over time for both types of…

This article presents an exploratory study that examines how 11 first-year writing instructors' conceptualizations of information literacy evolved over the course of their participation in an inquiry group co-developed and co-facilitated by the Libraries' teaching faculty and the Director of Composition & Rhetoric at a public university in the…

Learning to teach writing remains challenging for both student instructors and the experienced faculty, staff, and other professionals who mentor them. Many institutions have created local repositories of teaching-related materials such as syllabi and assignments, and some national efforts have also attempted to facilitate sharing resources to…

This study employed a mixed-methods strategy to assess how narrative writing is perceived and utilized in first-year composition (FYC) courses at American 4-year institutions. The history of narrative writing instruction is reviewed in an examination of the literature of rhetoric and composition scholars, as well as those who study narrative…

Topics and resources from honors education are used to teach argumentation in writing composition. The author discusses efficacies for increasing student awareness of, and reflection on, issues in honors education while engaging first-year students in honors issues that directly affect their lives.

Drawing upon three individual interviews with each of five students enrolled in a first-year writing (FYW) course I observed throughout a semester, this dissertation explores how a group of socially privileged students emotionally experienced, interpreted, and responded to discourses of differences encountered in their FYW course. Contributing to…

This qualitative study investigates how these students navigate the challenges of academic Discourse communities. Eight first-year students and one composition professor participated in semi-structured interviews, which were thematically coded around two core themes: students' cocreation of identity through writing, family, and university…

This article reports on a collaborative research project involving faculty in writing studies, communication disorders, and applied linguistics that sought to empirically describe the reading skills of students (N = 910) in freshman composition classes at one college and two universities in the northeast United States. The research team developed…