This program profile narrates how the Department of English at Brigham Young University (BYU) reviewed and revised the disciplinary writing requirements in the English BA program between 2006 and 2015. The story begins in 2006 with the dual problems of recognizing the lack of development in student writing in the major and of responding to…

The "college readiness" movement of the past decade coupled with the widespread adoption of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has generated pressure on content area teachers to develop disciplinary thinking skills while also providing more opportunities for student writing. The purpose of this three-article dissertation is to understand…

The inner-city high school in Washington, DC, that Guillaume Gendre joined as an assistant principal had a modest reputation for achievement but was nevertheless challenged to raise expectations for student work. In other schools, Gendre had used assignments--a specific kind of instructional task in which students are charged to think about an…

Many students enter tertiary education unfamiliar with the 'norms and conventions' of their disciplines. Research into academic literacies has shown that in order to succeed in their studies, students are expected to conform to these norms and conventions, which are often unrecognized or seen as "common sense" by lecturers. Students have…

The following dissertation explores how higher education faculty members' memories of learning content and learning to write influence their pedagogical practices and examines how disciplinary and departmental contexts intersect with those pedagogical practices. The research was designed as a nested case study that draws on interview data,…

Because of the recent revolutionary developments brought about by Web 2.0, the emergence and popularity of blogs as learning tools represent an important area of consideration by the higher education sector. Indeed, while many researchers have acknowledged the advantages of using blogs in this environment, it is clear that more investigation is…

This paper is a literature review report concerning educational uses of Wikipedia in the first 10 years of its existence. The aim of the work is the tracing and the presentation of published and validated educational applications of Wikipedia in a manner that could inform learning design by teachers or researchers. For the review, 24 scientific…

A semester-long faculty seminar at Hunter College involved teachers from 14 disciplines in weekly meetings regarding writing in the subject areas. Although the teachers read literature on writing and heard from outside writing experts, they spent most of the time working together on designing and criticizing writing assignments for their classes…