First-year courses prepare students for the transition to, and success in, college. Institutions are interested in assessing student learning outcomes to achieve institutional goals and maintain accreditation. Though it may be difficult to measure student learning and success, colleges aim to assess student learning in the classroom by setting…

In the 2015-16 school year, the authors of this article developed an innovative research and assessment project on a new first year composition curriculum based on a pedagogy they call Critical Hip Hop Rhetoric Pedagogy (CHHRP), an educational approach built upon the classroom-based research of linguistic anthropologist H. Samy Alim…

Developmental education is the most common approach used by community colleges to assist underprepared students for college-level course work. Yet there is limited evidence regarding this strategy on students assigned to the lowest level of the developmental sequence. This paper extends current knowledge on this critical question by examining the…

College students' English writing plays a vital role in their language learning and further education. However, the current college English teaching falls far behind to resolve this issue, which includes insufficient writing ability compared with that of listening and speaking, inadequate teacher instruction and students' exercise, negative…

This dissertation study seeks to determine whether feedback in the online Technical and Professional Communication classroom impacts student performance. This dissertation proposes that online Technical and Professional Communication instructors consider adopt such a feedback methodology in order to engage students with writing practices that…

As schools work to meet the ambitious Common Core State Standards in writing (Common Core State Standards Initiation, 2010), instructional approaches are likely to be examined. However, there is little research that describes the current state of instruction. This study was designed to expand the empirical base on writing instruction in first…

This paper explores the phenomenon of "patchwriting," a term which Howard (1992) coined to refer to the practice of "copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes" (p. 233). Although patchwriting in universities is often labeled simply as…

Successful implementation of academic standards depends on teachers' understanding of the intended policy and their interpretation of what the policy means for their instruction (Spillane et al., 2002). This study examines the writing tasks fourth- and fifth- grade teachers understand as being aligned with the CCSS [Common Core State Standards],…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively," offers educators three specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenges of teaching students in grades 6-12 to write effectively. This summary focuses on the third of the three recommendations: Use assessments of…

This article explores bodily movement practices as a foundational component of rhetorical awareness. Through ethnographic study of dance pedagogy, the author demonstrates how genre uptake is enabled by bodily experience; learned ways of moving produce inclinations toward certain rhetorical pathways over others. Enabling students to uptake new…

Since the adoption and subsequent fade of the Wyoming Resolution, we have seen the political economy of writing instruction change remarkably. Certainly, composition studies' disciplinary viability seems more solid, but the proportion of contingent writing teachers has increased to almost 70 percent. The authors of this article attribute these…

This article considers how relationships in the English classroom are influenced by the types of literacy activities, the role of the teacher, the tone of oral comments, and the types of writing students share with peers.

This study aims to find whether the adapted approaches of writing instructions and alternative assessment could improve the students' academic writing ability. This classroom-based action research was initiated from the observation and reflection of the researchers as English academic writing instructors in tertiary education. It was observed that…

This action research study explores first-year students' conceptions of the research process, with a focus on which aspects students find most challenging and how this information can guide stakeholders in developing curricular or service-based interventions. To gather student reflections on the research process, researchers assigned and collected…

Portfolio assessment (PA) is promulgated as a useful tool to promote learning through assessment. While the benefits of PA are well documented, there is a lack of empirical research on how students' self-regulation can be effectively fostered in writing classrooms, and how the use of PA can develop students' self-regulated capacities. This…