We conducted a study to examine how a writing-to-learn assignment influenced student learning of polymer behavior. In particular, we examined the role of specific content and a rhetorical framework as well as a structured writing process including peer review and revision. The student-generated writing was analyzed via a content-directed rubric.…

The task of turning undergrads into academics requires teaching them to reason about the world in a more complex way. We present the Argument Complexity Scale, a tool for analysing the complexity of argumentation, based on the Integrative Complexity and Conceptual Complexity Scales from, respectively, political psychology and personality theory.…

Since 2011, we have been working at an independent high school with a small group of teachers interested in studying their own teaching practices in ways that support both their individual and collective learning. The participating educators are engaged and challenged by their personal interests in deepening formative assessment practices while…

Writing educators have long sought to disrupt academic convention. However, we currently know little about students' affective experiences when they are asked to compose differently. This article explores the results of a research study to illuminate the feelings and attitudes students experience when convention is disrupted and offers pedagogical…

Where academic literacies are understood as situated social practices, effective academic literacy support needs to reflect the disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practices. However, the institutional separation of academic literacy teaching from disciplinary subject teaching, typical of UK universities, creates significant…

Assessment and evaluation practices within honors programs have attracted considerable attention within the honors academic community, e.g., the spring/summer 2006 volume of the "Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council." Calls for carefully created and constructed assessment activities within honors programs have met with mixed…

The Real/Ideal Research Project is comprised of three components, ordered in purposeful succession, designed to emphasize the interconnectedness of emotion, reason, and action. In the first component, students compose a personal narrative focused on a specific inequity they (have) experience(d) or witnessed. Here, students are encouraged to…

Establishing a positive, proactive approach to issues such as plagiarism requires that students are equipped with the skills and experience to act with integrity, and that educators are fully aware of the attitudes and ability of students, particularly when they start university. This project used a questionnaire-based methodology to probe the…

The following study was developed to investigate the development of writing skills in second and third grade students. The recent emphasis on writing, specifically writing in multiple genres, made in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, 2010) has increased the need to further understand how students write. The NAEP (2002) reports that…

Writing, a critical pedagogical tool, cultivates student learning and fosters deeper understanding of the material. When frequent, low-stakes (informal) writing activities help students write more freely, engage with the material and thus become active learners. Looking at students who are at opposite ends of a community college spectrum, this…

Instructors often use ePortfolios to facilitate deeper learning by providing an outlet for reflection, analysis, integrative thinking, and transfer of learning (Buyarski et al., 2015; Reynolds & Patton, 2014). In line with these objectives, I sought out to deepen learning and motivation on a required, semester-long assignment in an…

Computer-mediated collaborative writing has been increasingly implemented in L2 contexts due to wider awareness of affordances and benefits of Web 2.0 technologies. A systematic review of empirical studies over the recent decade is called forth in order to arouse broadened knowledge and provide new insights in this promising area. This study…

Increasingly, today's adult online college student is a Millennial possessing high self-esteem but low self-efficacy as cognitive characteristics. This work examines research into these cognitive differences, Bandura's self-efficacy theory, and the role of instructor feedback aimed at improving self-efficacy and self-directedness among these adult…

This qualitative study examined what teacher candidates learned in a field-based mediated Language Arts methods course, intentionally designed to support teacher candidates in learning what is possible rather than typical, in an urban school setting where curriculum is often prescriptive rather than generative. Culturally sustaining pedagogies…

The last decade has witnessed a strong impact of emerging technologies on language pedagogy due to the developments in the computer technologies. The use of authentic linguistic examples through corpora and concordance based activities is defined as data-driven learning and it exposes the students to examples of more realistic language than…