Many higher education institutions offer drop-in tutoring programs hosted by writing specialists to support struggling students while others may also/alternatively embed tutors directly into courses. In this quasi-experimental study, we compared survey results from 100 students in basic/developmental courses that featured embedded peer tutors with…

This study explores the discursive practices the researcher utilizes during recurring asynchronous writing consultations to engender mutually adjusted and context-driven interactions meaningful to writers' development during virtual tutoring. While earlier studies have critiqued asynchronous tutoring for its inability to efficiently promote the…

This article examines connections among disability, colonization, university policies, and writing center work in North America. By positing that university policies have long mimicked medical and scientific processes for creating--and then discriminating against--perceived categories of disability, this article makes interventions into…

Writing center literature often notes the stress and anxiety of students as a special concern for peer writing tutors, and tutor training manuals offer advice for tutors on how to manage student writers' anxiety and stress in sessions. Few writing center sources, however, examine the stress/anxiety tutors may experience as a result of their work…

In the field of writing center research there is a paucity of information regarding tutoring students with dyslexia. This comes as no surprise considering it is only in the last 50 years that there has been a conscious effort to include those who have exceptionalities in all areas of education. In addition to a lack of research and training there…

This study sought to determine the impact writing center consultations have on student writing self- efficacy and to illuminate effective consultant strategies for fostering student writing confidence. As part of a multimethods study, a survey was administered for students to reflect upon and to assess their feelings of writing self- efficacy by…

What do writers do with the feedback they receive? While the answer will vary depending on the writer's experience and the rhetorical situation, understanding what writers do can provide important information for course redesign and professional development of tutors and instructors. In this first of two manuscripts, the authors examine how…

Even small, taken-for-granted words can have a strong influence on the pedagogical effect of a writing conference. In this study, we examined how experienced and trained writing center tutors' use of the discourse marker so helped them to connect ideas and to manage their conferences with students. We examined the extent to which tutors' use of…

Replicable, aggregable, data- supported (RAD) research has become standard in writing center studies. Choice of research question is determined by local conditions and exigencies, often influenced by institutional assessment policy and national mandates. The methodology of choice in most writing center research is qualitative inquiry, though…

During class discussions, the author's fellow consultants would often lament consultations that could have gone better if they had only known the "rules" of how to handle the situation. They perceived that there were acceptable and unacceptable ways to approach certain situations, rather than a range of flexible choices. The author began to…

Because writing centers have long been viewed as fix-it shops, mentioning the word "grammar" can spark a heated debate over the writing center's role. A brief history of the most recent grammar wars begins with researchers in the 1960s who found that "formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in…

The writing center where the authors were trained and currently work emphasizes the model of non-directive, writer-based peer tutoring in which, as Jeff Brooks puts it, tutors "make the student the primary agent in the writing center session." As undergraduate peer tutors, they recognize that some students come into their writing center with goals…

Andrea, a doctoral student in education, has a demanding schedule. She has a young child, a job, a house on the market, and a spouse who travels so much that she can only see him on certain weekends. To cope with these unavoidable distractions to her research, she found the writing center and was paired with a fellow graduate student, Charisse.…

This article presents the text of a speech presented at The International Writing Centers Association and the National Conference on Peer Tutoring (IWCA-NCPTW) joint conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in November 2010. It stemmed from a larger project--a collection of previously published and new essays titled "Writing Together: Collaboration in…

Writing center tutors know that improving writing skills requires sustained effort over a long period of time. They also know that motivation--the drive to actively invest in sustained effort toward a goal--is essential for writing improvement. Because motivation can direct attention toward particular tasks and increase both effort and…