Students face challenging texts and concepts across the disciplines in higher education, and many students lack the reading skills and strategies to make sense of them. The aim of the small study described in this article was to explore the benefits, if any, of the difficulty paper, a written formative assessment that asks students to explore…

Writing is an integral part of the process of science. In the undergraduate physics curriculum, the most common place that students engage with scientific writing is in lab classes, typically through lab notebooks, reports, and proposals. There has not been much research on why and how we include writing in physics lab classes, and instructors may…

This teaching note describes the use of anonymous, online, graded, peer review in an undergraduate social work human behavior in the social environment writing-intensive course. Students (N=37) provided written feedback describing their learning from writing and receiving peer reviews. Students identified learning from receiving the peer reviews,…

This study focused on the institutional issue of alignment between developmental literacy courses and college-level coursework. Research suggests alignment between these courses is a key condition for successful transfer of learning (Grubb, 2013; Grubb & Cox, 2005; Roueche & Roueche, 1999; Tinberg, 2015). This collective case study aimed…

In the complexities of current realities, we are a writing collective of educators interested in placing hope in the present, particularly in composing practices and pedagogies. Drawing on a post-qualitative methodology, we weave together examples of practices of dance/movement, digital movie-making, and soil artivism with specific concepts of…

This article applies the perspective of "boundary work," an approach originating in science studies, to relations between the disciplines of Second Language Writing (SLW) and rhetoric and composition (R&C), especially to controversies surrounding the concept of translingualism. Boundaries both separate and connect, a dual potential…

Writing, with regards to academic training, has largely been relegated to the territory of primary education. Over the past fifty years, higher education administrators and faculty have become increasingly aware of eroding boundaries between high school and college. The considerable resource investment for the supply of writing courses generates…

A growing body of scholarship in writing studies has started exploring threshold concepts for writing, providing a synoptic view of the transformations students undergo as they learn about writing. However, the field has not yet undertaken a systematic investigation of threshold concepts for the teaching of writing. A distinction between threshold…

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) recognizes campuses around the world as fundamentally multilingual spaces, in which students and faculty bring to the acts of writing and communication a rich array of linguistic and cultural resources that enrich academic life and should be valued and supported. The aim of this…

The purpose of the study was to examine how disciplinary literacy instruction influenced the quality of science informational text produced by second-grade students (N = 45) using the compare/contrast and the sequence text structures. The instruction took place over eight weeks with two four-week units, and with three 30-minute lessons provided…

Incorporating engineering instruction into the elementary curriculum is not without challenges. Traditionally, researchers investigated using engineering design to promote students learning science concepts. More recently, researchers have conducted qualitative investigations to measure students' learning of engineering concepts after engaging in…

Once a privilege for the members of the elite, writing is now a staple of everyday life accessible to the masses. Despite its significance for individuals' economic, psychological, and educational well-being, it may not always be utilized to its full capacity. This is partly due to reductionist approaches to writing without full consideration of…

In moves to fortify the discipline and articulate its value, does writing studies risk perpetuating narrow views of disciplinarity and academic writing? Drawing from an analysis of the intersections between WAC/WID [Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines] and transfer scholarship in popular rhetoric and composition journals, I…

As WPAs at a research institution without a WAC program, we embarked on this project to learn about the types of writing prompts faculty across the disciplines assign and their expectations for student writing. Although our first-year composition program is genre-based and focuses on teaching for transfer, we did not know what genres other faculty…

This article is a critique of current approaches to the teaching and assessment of writing in schools in the UK. Successive government initiatives, most particularly the latest (impoverished) version of the English curriculum, are seen as having led to a situation in which pupils are taught in a way that does not improve the quality of their…