The definition is an important language form in the register of mathematics. Students need to understand the structure of a definition so that they can make sense of the definitions they encounter and so that they can construct their own definitions as part of organising their thoughts about the concepts they have explored. This article suggests…

Historians generally agree that causality is central to historical writing. The fact that many school history students have difficulty handling and expressing causal relations is therefore of concern. That is, whereas historians tend to favor impersonal, abstract structures as providing suitable explanations for historical events and states of…

This review considers evidence cited in support of and in opposition to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID). After defining WAC and WID terms and concepts and reviewing the literature on key developments of the WAC/WID movement, the authors recommend that key terms be defined more precisely and that multimodal…

How much do specialized academic discourse communities matter to undergraduate writers? To what degree should theories of specialized discourses influence the design of undergraduate Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs? At the University of Iowa, where an undergraduate Writing Fellows program engages peer tutors in writing-intensive…

To help writing faculty learn the language of discourse communities across campus, we conducted faculty interviews as a first attempt to describe knowledge about disciplinary cultures, specifically with regard to writing. Based on the data received from the interviews about disciplinary definitions and characteristics of good writing and how…

Approaching reflection from the perspective of a teachable skill set implies that research may inform how to help students reflect. Employing a framework of making connections often used in reading comprehension, this study aimed to characterize how making connections between the service-learning experience (SLE) and prior experiences in similar…

Digital storytelling is a promising instructional strategy as well as an emerging field of study in higher education. Courses on digital storytelling are offered in communications and creative writing programs at a number of universities. However, the potential for digital storytelling extends far beyond the fields of communication and media…

Writing fellow or writing associate (WA) programs trace their heritage to a single point of origin: the model developed at Brown University in the early 1980s by Tori Haring-Smith (Soven, 1993, 2001). Since then, the Brown model has spread to hundreds of schools. WA programs are so adaptable because they consist of many discrete elements, each of…

This text discusses how to create and incorporate effective writing assignments throughout the mathematics curriculum. It also emphasizes engaging students in a dialogue about mathematics while they are trying to learn. The first section provides concrete advice with a large number of examples so that an instructor can successfully begin to use…

A study aimed to increase understanding of how different writing-to-learn tasks invite the ways in which students construct meaning in writing from sources. The tasks used, writing either a report or a problem-based essay, required students to integrate prior knowledge with information from six textual sources in order to construct their own…

The Integrated Skills Reinforcement (ISR) technique, developed by faculty at La Guardia Community College in New York City, is a student-centered teaching and learning model which can facilitate learning for non-traditional, non-native (frequently underprepared) students. It aims to develop and integrate students' basic skills into course content,…

At Clackamas Community College, a system of contract learning has been adapted for use in a technical writing class. The course focuses on teaching the essentials of technical writing (i.e., clarity and organization in report writing); the basic employment attitudes that local businesses and industries expect; and the form of writing that the…

Developed by instructors from the Los Angeles Community College District, this guidebook provides materials to aid community college instructors teaching in a variety of subject areas to integrate writing and student learning in their classrooms. Chapter 1 addresses a number of common concerns that instructors have about using writing in their…

Without a clear idea of the continuity of literary traditions, one is apt to lose a firm grasp on the distinctive qualities of literacy and literate communities. Literary history teaches that writers arise out of literary traditions. In the United States in the last few decades, however, the act of writing has come to be seen as an act of totally…

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement has gone from valuable but less effective individual efforts to organized, district- and campus-supported projects based on goals for improved student learning in every area and every program. On the college level, WAC takes two forms: a more traditional, formally structured approach from faculty…