In this essay, I offer William James's notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think…

In the fall of 2009, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) initiated a series of research programs designed to support the high school reform program, "Excellence for All," based on more than 20 years of research on the school reform programs of the countries with the most successful education programs worldwide. A…

I created my Exploratory Survey on the Status of the Research Paper Assignment in First-year Writing/Composition Courses to learn whether the traditional research paper remained as common an assignment in 2009 as it had been in the past. My survey updates results from two previous surveys on the status of this assignment. Ambrose N. Manning's…

Online graduate programs in psychology are becoming common; however, a concern has been whether instructors in the programs provide adequate research mentoring. One issue surrounding research mentoring is the absence of research laboratories in the virtual university. Students attending online universities often do research without peer or lab…

In "Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms" (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti x), a group of K-12 educators conducted ethnographic work on the home lives of their working-class students. With the premise that people are "competent, they have knowledge and their life experiences have given them…

Effective writing skills are important for success in college, work, and for society. Although there is little argument about the importance of communication skills, there is more debate about whether or not students and graduates are actually attaining these skills. An examination of the impact of completing the college composition course on…

Student plagiarism and difficulties with writing have been widely investigated in the literature, but there has been less research on staff perspectives. A Joint Information Services Committee (JISC)-funded questionnaire (n = 80) and focus group study investigated the views of lecturers, librarians and study advisors at a UK post-92 university,…

This article shares the story of one student writer that shows how the challenges of writing from sources are tied to issues of voice and authority. Keith was a student in the author's first college writing class in the fall of 2002. As he undertook a transition from high school to college writer, the author was transitioning from high school to…

This study investigates whether the type of instruction (a single face-to-face librarian-led instruction, instructor-led instruction, or an online IL course--the Online Research Lab) has an impact on student information literacy gains in a Freshman English Composition program. A performance-based assessment was carried out by analyzing…

This essay seeks to explain the history that led to the establishment of First-Year Writing at Binghamton University, a program which offers a set of electives that complement discipline-specific and writing-across-the-curriculum courses while providing first-year students a common experience in and comprehensive introduction to college writing.

Students who enter college dreading their "required" courses are understandably skeptical of their ability to succeed in first-year writing. Their lack of preparation added to their skepticism results in students with too little confidence that their writing will ever resemble the models used in textbooks. As a tool of engagement,…

Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a…

In this article we address several issues and challenges that the evaluation of writing presents individual instructors and composition programs as a whole. We present electronic distributed evaluation, or EDE, as an emerging model for feedback on student writing and describe how it was integrated into our program's course redesign. Because the…

This essay presents case studies of "course-based tutoring" (CBT) and one-to-one tutorials in two sections of developmental first-year composition (FYC) at a large West Coast research university. The author's study uses a combination of rhetorical and discourse analyses and ethnographic and case study multi-methods to investigate both…

Participation, a commonly graded component of composition classrooms, is rarely the focus of current research studies. While some discussions have addressed grading practices or ways to increase participation, student and instructor voices have yet to be included in studies of classroom participation in composition courses. Yet these voices are…