Letters to the editor are an important part of democratic societies. In academic journals, letters serve as a form of postpublication review and thus permit continued discussion and debate of scientific ideas. However, letters and their importance are rarely taught to university students. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to propose a…

CalFresh benefits can help college students make ends meet while attending college, but not all eligible students apply. One contributing factor may be that students are not aware they are eligible. Therefore, outreach efforts informing them of their eligibility could help increase take-up rates. To test this, we designed and conducted two…

The ability to navigate emerging technologies is necessary for social and economic participation in the world. Research shows that children from privileged households receive the support needed to develop digital literacy skills, while children from families with lower socioeconomic status do not receive this support. It is the responsibility of…

In response to ongoing expansion of neoliberal ideology in democratic education, this essay details a classroom experiment that attempts to "redo," or "recraft" democracy. Recrafting democracy, in this context, takes shape in active efforts to compose an agonistic public sphere through a specific kind of "lettering a…

Faculty receive requests for recommendations from their students every year. They want to support their students as they apply for internships, full time jobs, and graduate school, but often struggle with how to do this in an efficient and effective manner. This is especially challenging given the number of students they have and the late and…

Since 2012, many Title IV institutions of higher education have sent their students debt letters to inform them of their outstanding loan amounts, estimated or real monthly payments, and other loan-related information. However, no extant research has analyzed whether these letters are written at an appropriate level for college students, nor has…

Although student loan debt has been rigorously studied over the past several decades, scant research has investigated how institutions of higher education communicate debt to current and former student borrowers. As COVID-19 forced the United States Department of Education to cancel the Annual Student Loan Acknowledgement as part of a student's…

This study explored the relationship between linguistic features and the rated quality of letters of application (LAs) and argumentative essays (AEs) composed in English by Chinese college-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A corpus of 260 LAs and 260 AEs were analyzed via a confirmatory factor analysis. Latent variables were EFL…

This study employed a novel user experience method, the love/breakup letter, to evaluate the usefulness of an online information literacy (IL) tutorial for students writing assignments with research requirements. Thematic coding of the letters showed that this method elicited revealing responses from students about their confidence in doing…

This qualitative study examines the information collected about applicants to mathematics or science teacher preparation programs (MSTPPs) and how university faculty perceive and value this information in admissions decisions. Based on document review and interviews with MSTPP faculty and admissions directors, we found that broad measures of…

Courses: This unit-level teaching assignment was designed for courses on rhetoric, persuasion, professional communication, public speaking, and business communication. Objectives: By completing this activity, students should be able to: (1) identify and research a specific job, scholarship, or award they'd like to pursue within the next six…

The research purpose was to identify (1) the problems encountered by academic and administrative staff in emails received from students, (2) positive and negative qualities of the authentic emails of higher education students, (3) functional explanations of the academic email, (4) the problems encountered by students in emails received from…

Modern college classrooms are increasingly diverse. We face classes where 18-year-olds sit beside grandmothers, native speakers of English sit beside speakers of other languages, and Christians, Jews, and Muslims share classrooms with atheists and agnostics. The question is: how do we take such a varied and ideologically differentiated group of…

There is increasing evidence that tax benefits for college do not affect college enrollment. This may be because prospective students do not know about tax benefits for college or because the design of tax benefits is not conducive to affecting educational outcomes. We focus on changing awareness of tax benefits by providing information to…

"The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy" was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. Rejecting outright the marketisation of the modern university, the book proposed a countercultural approach which denounced the seductive imperatives to overwork and competition and called on academics to make a more…