The initial composition course in the community college has the potential to be a transformative space for the identity formation of adult learners towards the linguistic signifier of "scholar." Freshman students of variable ages enter a new culture which demands the negotiation of an alternative academic language, an adaptation to the…

Recognizing a need to promote critical reading among students at our STEM university, the authors implemented an active reading strategy called double-entry notes across four general education writing and humanities courses. We hypothesized that the tool would help engage students in the critical reading strategies they tended to lack. The tool…

The first year writing "jumbo" is a large enrollment composition course with ninety students and nine embedded writing mentors. The "jumbo" structure "emerged from an 'entanglement' of the institutional environment and intentional innovation" (Jaxon). Currently taught with a human rights focus, but with other…

While Writing Studies scholars have embraced research on multilingualism, writing scholars have not developed program assessment methods that are informed by that scholarship. This profile describes a program assessment design that was informed by research on multilingualism, super-diversity, and consequential validity. This design included…

This article reports on one university's experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed "MonsterComp," including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures,…

ePortfolios are considered the eleventh high-impact practice (HIP) by the AAC&U (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities). They have been widely implemented in the humanities but remain underutilized in STEM fields. The benefits of engaged learning, metacognitive awareness, and professional identity development in those…

In US-based postsecondary education, first-year students commonly have their compositional ability consequentially assessed on the basis of standardized tests. As a result, students who score above certain thresholds on ACT, SAT, or AP exams often are placed into honors or remedial courses; receive credit remissions; and/or test out of general…

Supporting students transitioning from high school into college continues to be a challenge for many academics and policy makers. In this conceptual content analysis study, first-year composition (FYC) course syllabi were examined based on Kuh's (2008) High-Impact Practices (HIP) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities' (AAC…

This article examines how to increase access to undergraduate research within the interdisciplinary field of writing studies. Drawing on experiences with this effort, the authors argue that students need a more diverse range of opportunities to participate in undergraduate research. The article presents and analyzes three case studies of…

By 2025, the majority of "jobs in the United States will require postsecondary education and training beyond high school" (Lumina Foundation, n.d., p. 9). Earning college credit in high school, at times earning a postsecondary degree or credential simultaneously while working toward a high school diploma, presents an opportunity for…

This design-based research study examines the pedagogical role of social, digital annotation (SDA) in teaching reading as rhetorical invention, particularly the kind of invention necessary for thoughtful democratic participation in the contemporary discursive era, often described as troubled. In this dissertation study, I deployed a…

This unit, "Explorations of Identity and Privilege," was designed for first year writing courses at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) taught in 2015 and 2016. The course as a whole focused on writing and inquiry. Within this unit, students discussed essays relating to different forms of privilege (e.g. racial, gender, class) and…

The Writing Program (WP) at Saint Louis University has striven to create a course that draws on a richer disciplinary understanding of writing and rhetoric. The standard course structure, from which instructors are asked to fashion their own syllabi, asks students to pursue a scaffolded semester-long project. As they pursue the scaffolded…

This article reports on a statewide implementation of a corequisite model of instruction for first year writing at two- and four-year public, postsecondary institutions in Idaho. This project explores how these institutions manage political and economic mandates for educational reform while preserving educational quality for students and teaching…

The study investigates the perceptions of first-year writing faculty of how their students develop information literacy (IL). The authors conducted 16 semi-structured interviews and analyzed them using a qualitative inductive coding method. The study contributes a close and nuanced understanding of faculty perceptions of IL learning to a…