Background: Because plagiarism is such a common form of academic dishonesty, many instructors are seeking ways to effectively teach students to avoid plagiarism. Objective: The current study tested the effectiveness of a 3-pronged intervention to teach students in an upper-level psychology course to better understand plagiarism. Method: The…

This article reviews and responds to recent (re)turns to and reconceptualizations of contract grading in the teaching of writing. I reflect on my own experience using contract grading in a variety of pedagogical contexts, and how this experience complicates scholarship on contract grading (now rebranded as labor-based grading and engagement-based…

Collaborative writing tasks are common in multilingual university-level writing-intensive classes, but how multilingual language learners (MLLs) are socialized into this group work as a discursive practice is still poorly understood. This case study of adult MLLs in multilingual writing classes at a large public university provides insight into…

This article presents the findings of a study in which college freshman reflected on the process of writing a literacy narrative and considered the impact of such writing on their narrative identities. The author synthesizes existing scholarship on literacy narratives, discusses the methodology of interpretive phenomenological analysis utilized,…

Authors discuss how educators at two Minority Serving Institutions center culture and identity in intensive writing courses that support student success.

For almost 40 years, our university's first year writing program has included a shared outcome: "Students will appreciate the capacity of writing to change oneself and the world." This outcome, unlike our more typical composition goals concerning writing processes, rhetorical acumen, and critical research abilities, had never been…

This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move…

Through surveys and focus group conversations, we studied students' experiences with instruction in writing-intensive (WI) courses at our urban R1 university and their awareness of and attitudes about linguistic diversity. Specifically, we have explored discrepancies between students' experiences with languaging, language judgment, and our…

It is important for instructors to reflect on and develop their teaching practices and pedagogy. Using a poetic inquiry method, this article offers an alternative model for reflecting on academic writing and teaching practices using a found poetry cluster. My example focuses on graduate academic writing instruction. I create found poems from my…

Institutional assessment in higher education often restricts measurement of learning to outcomes that elide the complexity of learning processes and contexts in favor of data that is tidy and manageable. Moreover, such outcomes are frequently written to express an economic value for the learning to justify the purpose of education as a personal…

This study aims to understand how bilingual college students constructed literacy spaces across their lives rather than an in-school/out-of-school dichotomy. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991) spatial triad as a lens to examine the participants' spatial literacy practices, the findings show that some participants repurposed planned spaces into literacy…

Engagement is a core issue in language teaching and learning. Without the students' active involvement in the teaching--learning process, educational objectives could not be achieved. Accordingly, the concept of engagement has been the focus of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. This research examined the effects of corpus-based…

There is valuable scholarship on the importance of teaching narratives in the FYC classroom, but none does so through the frame of vulnerability. This paper explores, through an IRB approved case study, how composition teachers can best guide students to write powerful and well-crafted personal narratives to ignite students' own voices, histories,…

In academia, there remains a broad cultural divide between STEM and the humanities that was identified over half a century ago by C.P. Snow. However, the nature of this divide has changed in recent years as a scientific tool, the digital computer, has become ubiquitous in daily life. The humanities must now contend with how to account for this…

In order to better understand how play can be used as a learning tool to teach students in college writing courses, this dissertation examines how play is used in the undergraduate college writing classroom. Using a qualitative case study and narrative inquiry, instructors and students in the University of Minnesota's (UMN) Writing Studies…