First-year courses prepare students for the transition to, and success in, college. Institutions are interested in assessing student learning outcomes to achieve institutional goals and maintain accreditation. Though it may be difficult to measure student learning and success, colleges aim to assess student learning in the classroom by setting…

How does one create a class where the theoretical concepts emerge through classroom practice and engagement? This is the question that Mariaelena posed to herself when taking over the position of Director of the Interpersonal Communication course at the University of South Florida. In this essay we describe how we worked through a new way of…

This case study started when I noticed that my ESL (English as a Second Language) students from all over the world had a hard time not only adjusting their writing/textual production to the language but also to the organizational structures of the paragraph I was presenting to them in my intermediate writing class. Considering that my students…

Google Docs, an online word processing application, is a promising tool for collaborative learning. However, many college instructors and students lack knowledge to effectively use Google Docs to enhance teaching and learning. Goals of this study include (1) assessing the effectiveness of using Google Docs in an out-of-class collaborative writing…

This action research combined qualitative and quantitative techniques to investigate two different types of writing assignments in an introductory undergraduate statistics course. The assignments were written in response to the same set of prompts but in two different ways: homework journal assignments or initial posts to a computer discussion…