The higher education (HE) sector in Australia is in a state of flux due to a range of social, political and economic factors. Increased competition, greater student diversity, tautening of industry exigencies, reduced funding, and rapid technological advances are key drivers of change in this environment. Within this period of transformation, HE…

Developmental education has increasingly become part of the national debate in higher education. This is particularly true for developmental mathematics courses which, in general, have the highest rates of failure and non-completion of any developmental subject area. This manuscript describes the current state of the art in developmental…

This article examines two course redesigns undertaken to improve student support, learning, and retention in the basic writing program at Oakland University, a doctoral research university in southeast Michigan, where support for developmental writers has fluctuated dramatically between nurture and neglect over the past fifty years. However,…

"Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope" (hooks, 2003), offers insights that are easily transferable to the field of developmental education. bell hooks' (2003) rich descriptions of her experiences as an educator, both within and beyond the classroom, are valuable reading for educators seeking to expand their perspectives on their…

Counselors at a public community college who teach a first-year college success course to developmental education students do not have effective opportunities or a systematic method to develop their teaching practice. Moreover, like a majority of community college and university instructors, many counselors do not have formal training in…

This article presents a summary of the main findings of a national literature review completed as part of a larger study of basic skills effective practices. The study summarized here was commissioned by the California Community Colleges System Office with the purpose of conducting a comprehensive review of national literature and identifying…

Administrators at 4-year, public institutions of higher education commonly negotiate a balance between the oft-competing goals of access and excellence. This is heightened within minority-majority campuses, such as Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), serving substantial numbers of first-generation degree seekers and low-income students.…

Recently, scholars of rhetoric and composition have shown much interest in the ancient composition exercises known as "progymnasmata". This paper explains how these exercises, which provided ancient students with a transitional curriculum between grammar and rhetoric, have theoretical and practical merit for contemporary compositional…

This paper describes a study which utilized Kitchener and King's (1985) Reflective Judgment model to assess levels of reflectivity in 80 undergraduate students at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, before and after taking a one-semester general studies course with an environmental focus. A curricular intervention was designed to help…

Reports on a study of the use of sentence combining in developmental writing classes. (MKM)

A developmental English program for a liberal arts college should be individualized and intellectually challenging to students entering a four-year baccalaureate program. Such a program must emphasize motivation, flexibility, and a well-conceived progression for acquiring skills. It should view writing as a holistic process and should use such…

Some of the attitudes, expectations, and techniques of the English as a second language (ESL) teacher and the ESL student may be profitably applied in the developmental composition classroom. Although developmental students are native English speakers, many of them react to formal, written English as if it were a foreign language. Fostering ESL…

The principal goal was to determine if significant differences existed between special and developmental education programs offered by private and public institutions in Ohio. The programs were examined, comparing such variables as rationale and objectives, instructional methods, and supportive services in order to determine their relationship to…

Offers a technique for teaching vocabulary that integrates the use of individual students' needs and experiences with the use of sentence context in determining specific situational word meanings. (FL)

This guide was developed to fill a need identified by high school educators and Alberta Advanced Education and Technology staff. The Guide introduces students to the principles of career and education planning and various authorized Alberta resources by helping students work through the planning process. The student guide is a series of modules or…