The University of Maryland First-Year Innovation & Research Experience (FIRE) was launched in 2014 and initially developed to provide a broad range of undergraduate students with research experience. As the program has grown and matured during six years of operation, the student outcomes targeted have evolved to include a broader range of…

The author argues that significant inroads in the destigmatization of basic writing courses and students can be made when students are asked to choose not only which FYW course they believe best meets their needs (directed self-placement, or DSP) but also to choose from among a variety of courses (including corequisite courses, particularly those…

Studies have shown that students' positive experience during their first year in college plays a significant role in their success in terms of persistence and satisfaction. That premise has been the motivation for the development of a first-year connection course by the Department of Chemical Engineering at Tennessee Tech University. Recent…

Purpose: This study presents the development and evaluation of a Constructively Aligned Teaching Sequence (CATS) for teaching the organismal biology of Senior High School. It tried to explore teaching-learning activities and assessment tasks that may be designed to address students' conceptions and teachers' difficulties in teaching organ systems.…

Cognitive styles play an important role in influencing the learning process, but to date no relevant study has been conducted using lag sequential analysis to assess knowledge construction learning patterns based on different cognitive styles in computer-supported collaborative learning activities in online collaborative discussions. This study…

The evolution of The Human Event, a course sequence at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University, provides a case study of using a program's history to understand its present and improve its future. While Barrett is situated at a public university with 76,000 students, and is now a large college in itself with 4,803 honors students,…

The Virginia Tech Summer Academy (VTSA) Program, developed by through a collaborative partnership between faculty, administrators and staff concerned by attrition among first year students, was introduced in summer 2012 as a campus initiative to assist first-year college students transition and acclimate to the academic and social systems of the…

Presents several assumptions about scientific writing and from these derives teaching methods for a year-long sequence of writing courses for science freshmen. (DD)

A freshman composition course taught to a group of science majors at Case Institute of Technology was based on the premise that learning to write involves a stylistic response to style. This book presents, through the eyes of the course's teacher, a novelistic account of teaching and learning. Thirty assignments that were given to the students are…

Increasing numbers of teachers seem to recognize that sequencing assignments is an effective way to teach writing. A sequence of 20 writing assignments was developed by four composition instructors at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado. The first eight exercises asked cadets to look at and think about their physical surroundings at…

A study of the effect of an "incremental" version of a generative rhetoric approach to writing instruction was conducted to determine whether such an approach would increase students' syntactic complexity. Ninety-eight college students were randomly assigned to one of five experimental or five control sections of a freshman composition…

The paper is based on research carried out on secondary school students and students commencing their university studies in mathematics. The basic purpose of the research was to investigate the understanding of the concept of a sequence and to determine the sources of the formation of revealed conceptions. To achieve the objectives an expanded set…

This study examines the use of "full processing" as a teaching model in basic speech communicaton courses. Full processing has four sequential components: a theoretically and factually based lecture, a transition discussion period, a simulation game, and a postgame discussion that relates the simulation game to the lecture material. The study's…

After describing the development of a listening component in a university study skills curriculum, this paper presents ten assignments on effective listening skills for use as college study skills. The listening assignments are presented in a sequence beginning with focusing attention and following oral instructions precisely and ending with…

Case studies of six college freshmen enrolled in freshman composition courses that used sequenced assignments addressed to the same topic all term were used to investigate how students define revision, how their teachers define it, and what is important about the differences in these definitions. The students possessed a common theory of revision…