Identifying effective and time-efficient approaches to teaching students how to write from scholarly sources benefits students and instructors. Students in a general psychology course learned a concrete method to improve this type of synthesis writing. The intervention was brief, consisting of viewing an online tutorial outside of class and…

For over four years, students enrolled in remedial writing classes who attended eight writing center tutorials directly linked to their assignments had an average pass rate of 95.6 percent, whereas students who did not attend any writing center tutorials had an average pass rate of 39.4 percent. These correlations are just that--correlations that…

The usefulness of teaching advanced composition in a writing tutorial program has been demonstrated at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst with students who have passed college freshman English and who feel they still need some work in their writing. Justification for using the tutorial method is based on the premise that a teacher cannot say…

Gives suggestions for making tutorial writing sessions constructive and fruitful. A tutorial component is a program of individual meetings with the teacher for each student in the class. Their purpose is to go over with each student his essays or compositions. Benefits and cautions of these sessions are spelled out. (PJM)

Discusses tutorials and their origins, comparing them to lectures and seminars. Expounds on the objectives of tutorials and the advantages for both students and tutors alike. Maintains that tutorials are student centered and thus lead to a higher quality learning environment. (RW)

Found that classroom instruction was more effective than a tutorial approach to freshman English. (DD)

Describes how a writing center was established at Oak Knoll School in New Jersey which used honors English students as its staff and how it helped relieve students' negative attitudes towards writing. (CRH)

An approach to the teaching of composition undertaken by the University of South Carolina writing laboratory is described in which the objective is to educate students and teachers in the composition process and to discover more about how writing is learned. Focus is on helping people learn to think. (LBH)

No significant differences in attrition rates were found between groups of students enrolled in conventional and individualized remedial freshman English courses. (JH)

Many college students, unaware of how their writing strikes others and unaccustomed to an audience of college teachers, try to write with sophistication or profundity with little success. These students need the experience of writing for an audience that talks back; one that is diverse, has a strong reason to be frank in its criticism and praise,…

Twenty-eight composition teachers at a large university, a two-year college, and an engineering college, all of whom had taught composition through both the tutorial method and typical classroom methods, were interviewed regarding advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches. Among the advantages of tutorials mentioned were the chance to…

This study describes in detail the synthesis of two relatively new, widely accepted and critically approved teaching methods, writing workshops and peer tutoring programs, in a coordinated program designed to improve student writing skills and attitudes. After tracing the origin of this experiment to specific concerns about the use of standard…

Open admissions as an educational policy in higher education depends upon the success of remediation programs in English and especially in composition courses. Because so many English majors will spend part of all of their professional lives teaching, their training at both the undergraduate and graduate levels should prepare them for teaching,…

Recounts a program that organized composition students into writing teams to overcome (1) too much reliance on a teacher, (2) lack of student cooperation, (3) excessive individual competition, and (4) an overall negative atmosphere concerning writing. (CRH)