Positioned within our field's work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that…

Research in rhetoric and writing has found that Wikipedia-based education allows for direct and transparent observation of practices and concepts related to writing process, research, social collaboration, and digital rhetoric while also providing opportunities for authentic writing situations. However, much of this literature has been focused on…

The authors present research findings from a collective case study (n=5) conducted in a multimodal composition course for pre-service English teachers. Researchers studied how a course focused on how multimodal composition influenced pre-service teachers' identities as writers and their stances on literacy instruction. Data consisted of students'…

This study analyzed three analytical essays and three metacognitive reflections written by 36 high school sophomores during one school year. After they had written analytical essays, students wrote reflections in which they described their writing process, explained what they did well, and identified two areas for improvement. The study focused on…

This pilot study aims at integrating a socio-pragmatic concept, Cooperative Principles, into an experimental writing project on the genres of comparison and contrast. It reports on a six-week study of five undergraduates voluntarily recruited in a university located in central Taiwan. In surveying their writing momentum before and after the…

Scholars and teachers within the field of composition have long heralded the merits of reflective writing. Whether written intermittently throughout a course or near the end (typically in the genre of portfolio cover letter), reflective writing assignments are thought to promote cognitive development by helping students become more aware of their…

Structured opportunities for reflective writing allow students to polish their writings and to reflect actively on their written creations, while encouraging clearer and more honest writing products. In addition, the use of reflective writing can transform students as they begin to incorporate metacognition, or thinking about their thinking, into…

In this article, I describe my reflections on developing student authors through a class research project. I review the assignment origins and description and my role in the students' developmental journey from transforming a class assignment to a publishable work. (Contains 1 figure.)

In this article, I demonstrate how the use of reflective writing assignments in first-year composition facilitated students' understanding of their own writing process strategies. I first discuss the theoretical roots from which reflective practice among student writers grows. Next, I employ my students' voices to demonstrate that reflection…

As students' problem-solving processes in writing are rarely observed in face-to-face instruction, they have few opportunities to participate collaboratively in peer review to improve their texts. This study reports the design of a reciprocal peer review system for students to observe and learn from each other when writing. A sample of 95…

Much of the work in academic writing has focused on the cognitive rather than the affective and social aspects involved in project-based writing. Emphasis in past research has been on skills and processes of writing rather than on affective factors such as motivation, attitudes, feelings or social factors involving intrapersonal and interpersonal…

While writing pedagogy instructors assign their students a range of writing tasks, often as central or repeated features of the course, a crucial question has not yet been addressed: does it matter what new teachers write? If pedagogy students are being assigned writing in part to further develop their attitudes and practices related to teaching…

This document presents the proceedings of the 20th Annual Research Forum held June 25, 2015, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 21 action research papers: (1) History Lives! The Use of Simulations in a High School Social Studies Classroom (Lydia Adkins); (2) Using Francophone Music in the High…

This study uses student reflections of previous success in academic writing to guide instructors as they design writing assignments. Seventy-one students in five classes responded to a questionnaire designed to help them identify particularly successful writing experiences and reflect on the circumstances, strategies, and methods they believed…

After several years of teaching Sociological Thought--an upper division course that focuses on classical, modern, and contemporary sociological theories--the author came across the idea of student portfolios. As a consequence, the course has undergone far-reaching changes. The content remains relatively intact; however, today the theory course…