This study investigated the impact of an Internet based program designed to improve basic writing skills on grammar and punctuation scores on an English Competency Test. Three groups in a small Midwestern university's freshmen composition class were tested: a control group (Test Group 1), which did not use the program; and two treatment groups:…

In this article, the authors report on an assessment project they recently conducted at their open admissions community college to assess student work at the end of the basic writing sequence. The authors' focus for this project was on the way students used essay structure. They gathered artifacts from students who were deemed "ready" by…

English 109.02 is the second of a three-course basic writing track available to all students at The Ohio State University, Ohio's largest public university and flagship institution, which in total serves approximately 45,000 undergraduate students across all campuses. While the Columbus campus places students into the course based on a preliminary…

As part of a broad, campus-wide Writing Initiative designed to improve student-writing skills, Fairleigh Dickinson University opened a new campus writing center in fall 2006. Concurrently, a separate component of this initiative was launched to replace the English for General Purposes instruction offered in the traditional English as a Second…

Many students experience difficulty in acquiring basic writing skills and educators need to efficiently address those deficits by implementing an intervention with a high likelihood for success. The current article demonstrates the utility of using a brief experimental analysis (BEA) to identify a letter-formation intervention for a second-grade…

At York College, many of the students fit the linguistic and educational profile of basic writers, and yet there is no remediation built into the curriculum. It falls to the writing center, then, to provide our students with the academic support that they need in order to move beyond being classified as developmental writers. In this article, I…

Remarkably little has been published on what works or does not work in online basic writing (BW) instruction. Internet-based learning is not a natural fit for BW students, and instructors planning hybrid or distance learning courses face a difficult task, with little theory to guide them. This article reviews current research and advice on three…

This investigation was a case study to measure the retention and persistence effects of a learning community in developmental English at an urban community college. The study used student demographic and course outcome data to quantify the extent to which learning community participation could contribute toward remedying the historically low…

In this article, the authors discuss what works for them in their first-year composition classes. In order to promote critical thinking and goal setting within her developmental writing and first-year composition classes, Susan Plachta begins their first class session by completing the standard introductions and syllabus discussions and finishes…

This article examines how institutions of higher education conflate moral and descriptive terms for good, bad, remedial, and basic writing students. It outlines some of the social and historical developments that have led to exclusionary admissions and curricular requirements, and identifies how Christian institutions are complicit in these…

In this essay, the authors describe the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project that conducted a qualitative study of the writing development of 21 student writers during the first year of college, tracking their progress in an English 101 course and following them as they moved into the core, transfer-level composition course.…

This article examines Yale's "Awkward Squad" of "basic" writers between 1920 and 1960. Using archival materials that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions of this early, "pre-Shaughnessy" site of remedial writing instruction, I argue for a re-definition of "basic" in composition studies using local, institutional values rather than generic…

This study will analyze the process of revising a first-year writing program at a large Midwestern university. The institutional structure and practice of first-year writing, particularly the connected subject of basic writing, creates a site where many interrelated areas of research converge--disciplinary, pedagogical, institutional, and…

The critical literature abounds with examples of possible educational uses of Web 2.0 technology in which students become active participants in the production of knowledge through blogging, social networking, creation of podcasts, and other forms of constructivist education. At the same time, teachers, whom the data indicate are somewhat…

The author describes the challenges of a four-year, open-admission institution where equality of access has not equaled equality of success for basic writers. While there is a good deal of scholarship on student departure by compositions and experts in student retention and persistence, some models of student departure and success offered by these…