Writing apprehension is a phenomenon that manifests as fear and avoidance of evaluated writing that can affect students' college and career choices. Writing apprehension has been shown to negatively correlate with self-efficacy, which is one of four forms of learned resourcefulness that have been shown to help an individual maintain emotional…

This dissertation investigates the experiences of multilingual writers in a writing center at a major research university based in the United States. It includes interviews with the writers and with the tutors who serve multilingual writers, to understand if these writers are getting what they need in the writing center to be successful in their…

The purpose of this basic interpretive qualitative research study was investigating the perceptions of LGBTQ+ college students regarding their out-of-school literacies and the impact of their participation in a non-academic writing group focusing on their out-of-school writing and identities. Situated within the New Literacy Studies (NLS)…

Despite growing theoretical and empirical evidence that writing has the potential to be an effective tool for student learning in undergraduate mathematics, writing-to-learn integration in mathematics is rare. Major deterrents include perceived lack of alignment between writing and learning goals, deficit views of students' writing abilities, and…

This phenomenological dissertation in practice explored the transformative impression of artificial intelligence (AI) on the academic achievement of historically excluded learners within post-secondary education. This research, reinforced by feedback intervention theory, systems theory, and the theory of academic optimism and student achievement…

The Ethical Reasoning in Action program leveraged program assessment data to further promote student learning based on their effective educational framework for ethical reasoning: The Eight Key Question (8KQ) strategy. A cross-disciplinary team of five core researchers launched the first constructivist qualitative inquiry into students' ethical…

Using case study and cross-case qualitative analyses, the researcher explored the utilization of wordless picture books as mentor texts with young multilingual learners in second grade. Eight students participated in the study and four focus students were highlighted through case studies. The researcher implemented three, 45-minutes lessons per…

This dissertation examines how disabled students and faculty access and navigate higher education through a rhetorical perspective. More specifically, this dissertation focuses on the tactics these disabled rhetors use to navigate encounters with academic ableism and what they can teach faculty about creating an accessible composition classroom. I…

On average 66% of high school graduates in the United States enroll in some form of post-secondary education after high school graduation. However, less than half of students sitting for the ACT in 2019 were deemed college ready in evidence-based reading, writing and math and as many of two thirds of first year college students enroll in at least…

The purpose of this action research was to evaluate the effect of instructional scaffolding on information literacy skills of college students in an English Composition I (ENG 101) course at Urban Community College in the Southeast. Information literacy is defined as a set of skills to recognize an information need as well as locate, evaluate, and…

This dissertation provides a model for reconsidering student agency in educational spaces and specifically in self-placement practices. Employing a Cooperative Inquiry framework in which students were included in the research process, this project sought to understand the experience of incoming students at a larger research-intensive institution…

Across the nation, incoming first-year undergraduates enter the university with a major that they selected before they had any lived-experiences as a college student. With more students changing their major than keeping the one they initially enrolled with, an inequity arises between those students whose pre-college experiences prepare them to…

This dissertation study explores the lived experiences of three graduate writers. Using narrative inquiry and ethnographic methods, I collected and analyzed data that focused on how three graduate writers, in two PhD programs housed within the same college of education, perceived and experienced their writing projects and themselves as writers.…

The goal of this qualitative single case study was to explore the effects of expressive writing as a self-regulation strategy in a suburban high school algebra classroom for reducing self-reported math anxiety. A variety of stressors related to the school environment impact adolescents, including peer dynamics, stress from the high school…

This research seeks to better understand the attitudes and dispositions of advanced-level English Language Arts students toward the activities of academic research and writing, and to explore the ways that critical pedagogies focused on authentic inquiry and composition interact with these attitudes. The project draws upon research in student…