Lecturer feedback on students' essays is important to the quality of the experience students have at university (Norton & Norton, 2001). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether early childhood students at one university actually read lecturer feedback on their essays and, if they did, what they found helpful and not helpful to…

Current career literature provides little insight into how women interpret career-relevant experiences, advice, or information, particularly when it is contradictory. This paper uses findings from interviews with 40 college women to provide empirical confirmation for the link between self authorship and career decision making. Findings underscore…

The force of the grammar-rhetoric-composition program at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, a sixteenth-century institution of higher education for sons of the indigenous elite located in one of two large barrios in the valley of Mexico, is measured. Tlaltelolco is a composition-rhetoric site designed for those perceived as needing…

The compelling challenge to the notion that increased access to higher education in the United States has improved, is overviewed. However, according to Sharon O'Dair, graduate students choose an arcane literary specialty over composition, as it is not regarded as challenging and rewarding.

Why do some students prosper as college writers, moving forward with their writing, while others lose interest? In this essay we explore some of the paradoxes of writing development by focusing on the central role the freshman year plays in this development. We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1)…

Students more familiar with failure than success can carry inhibiting levels of fear, and mature students are twice as likely to drop out of Higher Education in their first year than younger students. Through its use of conversational and supportive tones, this study guide puts readers at ease assisting the transition to academic study. The author…

Having low domain knowledge is a significant constraint when using the Internet. This study examined the effectiveness of three potential supports for learners with low domain knowledge, including having plenty of time to search the Internet, using notes taken during the search when writing an essay about the topic, and having high levels of…

Language and learning advisers and non-English speaking background (NESB) postgraduate students negotiate complex territory when working together to improve students' texts. However, the individual writing consultation is sometimes conceptualised one-dimensionally by faculty as a form of editing. The writing consultation with NESB postgraduate…

Southeastern Massachusetts is home to six public institutions of higher education. In 2003, at the invitation of Bridgewater President Dana Mohler-Faria, five of them joined together to form a regional collaborative called CONNECT. (The original members were Bridgewater State College, Bristol, Cape Cod and Massasoit community colleges, and the…

This article argues for the use of teacher-generated corpora in content-based courses. Using a content course for engineering and architecture students as an example, the article explains how a corpus consisting of texts from textbooks and journal articles helped students learn grammar, vocabulary, and writing. The article explains how the corpus…

This experiment involved college students (N = 464) working on an authentic learning task (writing an essay) under 3 conditions: no feedback, detailed feedback (perceived by participants to be provided by the course instructor), and detailed feedback (perceived by participants to be computer generated). Additionally, conditions were crossed with 2…

The programs WordSmith and VocabProfile were used to research lexical differences between essays written in English by Spanish undergraduates and a set of essays independently judged as being of TWE grade 6 standard. The results indicated that writing by this group of students was generally characterised by low lexical variation, a preponderance…

This paper reports the findings of an experiment that investigated the reactions of Saudi college students to collaborative learning techniques introduced in two modalities: face-to-face and web-based learning. Quantitative data were collected with a questionnaire that examined the changes of three constructs: attitudes toward collaboration,…

"Developing and Assessing an Online Research Writing Course" discusses how the Writing Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) created a hybrid, online research writing course, Writing 50, and assessed that course. The assessment, which is at the center of this piece, was dovetailed with assessment literature in…

One challenge faced by many writing teachers is meeting the needs of students with varying skill and confidence levels. This article describes strategies used in a Composition and Rhetoric I course to meet the needs of basic and college-level writers. Sample assignments focusing on the theme of literacy and learning are provided, including an…