This study is a follow-up to one on the pass rates of basic writers in a large, urban Midwestern university. Students who came for eight or more mandatory writing center tutorials for their basic writing course passed at a rate of 90% or higher each semester from 2013-2016. The current study examined their graduation rates. These students…

Dayra Fallad Mendoza and Elizabeth Kerl's article, "Student Perceived Benefits of Embedded Online Peer Tutors," (EJ1317160) from the Spring 2021 issue, presents findings from a two-semester study of an embedded tutor program that took place during the COVID-19 crisis as the world went remote. The study aimed to determine whether students…

This article shares findings from a survey study (n = 73) focused on writing center administrator (WCA) perceptions of two phenomena we see on many secondary and postsecondary campuses in recent years: writing centers expanding to become learning centers, and writing centers consolidating or merging with other tutoring services on campus. Through…

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…

Fostering a sense of belonging for community college students is a shared responsibility among all institutional areas, including academics, student services, and student life. This article presents a collaborative tutorial initiated and sustained by academics and support services that addressed the needs of students cycling through writing…

Universities across Canada and elsewhere have a longstanding focus on improving students' writing skills, including for the purpose of fostering better learning. In this paper, we present findings from two sources of data--a discursive analysis and student survey--exploring the impact of writing instruction and support in the context of a required…

The shift in literacy education has reshaped the perspective of writing instruction in its theory and philosophy of the writing center in the US. This study examines how the writing center tutors instruct themselves for the work of writing instruction through mock tutorials. The tutors demonstrate how they make sense of the collaborative process…

Writing centers, an established, U.S.-rooted writing pedagogy, have spread across the globe, serving various populations in different countries. With Chinese universities' exciting endeavors to implement writing centers in their local contexts, little is known as to whether and how the writing center approach serves Chinese EFL students' specific…

To support international students using English as a second language, many universities now provide access to one-to-one writing tutorials with language teaching specialists. Although writing tutorials have become widespread, the current study is one of very few investigations into their interactional unfolding. This study examines advice giving…

Peer tutoring in higher education aims to enhance student learning, and confidence. In writing centres, peer writing tutors use critical questioning to make the tutorial sessions student-focused and productive. The nature of questions influences the outcomes of the tutorials, yet research has not devoted sufficient time to unpacking what form this…

Purpose: Written English is a morphophonemic language. Researchers have documented that a conscious awareness of the morphological structure of English morphology is predictive of students' written language skills and that morphological awareness instruction leads to improvements in morphological awareness and in other written language…

This qualitative study investigates tutor and student interaction in an online multiliteracy center (the Hub) at a major public research university. This study addresses a gap in the current literature on how writing centers transition to multiliteracy centers and prepare their tutors for consulting with students around aspects of design. There is…

To better understand the promising effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on language learning processes and outcomes, this study explored DDL learning events enabled by the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), a web-based platform containing an English language corpus annotated to enhance rhetorical input, a concordancer that was searchable for…

For students new to higher education, the task of developing their academic writing skills, and particularly the principles and practices of source-referencing, can be daunting. Although institutions and teachers can and do provide positive guidance on this score, all too often students veer into inadvertent plagiarism through lack of confidence…

Lee Shulman's concept of signature pedagogies in the professions has captured the imagination of many researchers and educators. In higher education, the concept has been extended to teaching in particular disciplines, and it is here argued that the concept of signature pedagogy can be usefully extended to an influential teaching system in the…