The authors compared student perceptions of audio and written feedback in order to assess what types of students may benefit from receiving audio feedback on their essays rather than written feedback. Many instructors previously have reported the advantages they see in audio feedback, but little quantitative research has been done on how the…

Despite the growing linguistic diversity of students in today's community college writing classes, there has been little research on the unique problems that instructors face when students from differing second linguistic and cultural backgrounds populate the same classrooms. This study explores the extent to which four community college writing…

The practice of grading student writing often seems arbitrary and unfair to students. It is important to students and educators that writing is fairly and accurately assessed in order to facilitate demonstrable improvement in their composition. This research addressed a specific writing rubric as a method to mitigate implicit or subconscious…

This study examines the relationship between students' SAT essay scores and college outcomes, including first-year grade point average (FYGPA) and first-year English course grade average (FY EngGPA), overall and by various demographic and academic performance subgroups. Results showed that the SAT essay score has a positive relationship with both…

Student responses to the West Virginia Educational Standards Test (WESTEST) 2 Online Writing Assessment are scored by a computer-scoring engine. The scoring method is not widely understood among educators, and there exists a misperception that it is not comparable to hand scoring. To address these issues, the West Virginia Department of Education…

The author conducted a two-year study of the career portfolio programs in place at high schools in two Midwestern communities. By pursuing this research project, the author was able to develop answers to his questions about career portfolios and student differences. More generally, this project allowed him to reflect on the ways all writing…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

The aim of the study discussed in this paper was to link existing research about the argumentation skills of students to the teaching of life-cycle analysis (LCA) in order to promote an evidence-based approach to the teaching of and learning about materials used in consumer products. This case-study is part of a larger design research project that…

Informed by the experiences of former peer mentors, this qualitative study examines the structure of opportunity of a university retention program. Extending the concept of social capital, the study investigates the experiences of students who served as peer mentors, and how their involvement in the retention program has influenced their social…

The purpose of this study was to determine if first language interference does play a significant role in the use of articles in English by native speakers of Arabic as compared to other ESL learners. An error analysis was conducted on the use of English articles in essays taken from two groups of advanced ESL learners. The essays were composed by…

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one…

This review assessed the use of self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) for teaching written composition strategies to students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorders. We examined the participants and the settings in which SRSD has been used, the writing strategies tested, genres addressed, and the effects of SRSD on outcome measures.…

The need for sophisticated and highly skilled educators in urban schools is painfully obvious, even to the most casual observer. National and local test data demonstrate that students in urban schools are generally not achieving at the same levels as are their suburban and more affluent peers. Teacher educators in urban areas struggle with how to…

In light of recent interest in the limitations of early and mid-career mentoring (Driscoll et al 2009; Trowers 2011), this case study of a women's scholarly activity and goal setting Community of Practice (CoP) indicates that such groups can offer extensive peer mentoring at one teaching-oriented state university in the United States. Using a…

Since the author began work in reflective practice, at first informally in the late 1970s and then more formally in the mid-1980s, he has always looked at reflective practice as a compass of sorts to guide teachers when they may be seeking direction as to what they are doing in their classrooms. The metaphor of reflection as a compass enables…