This paper reports the findings of a study of student writing that assessed the skill needs of a cohort of developmental writing students enrolled in a co-requisite composition course at a community college that is part of the City University of New York (CUNY). This credit-bearing course fulfills the first half of the required composition…

In this archival history, a college writing teacher and recent graduate together challenge the integrationist narrative of Basic Writing, grounded in "white innocence" and dating back to the 1970s. Joining other studies of physical and linguistic segregation in higher education, we recover the true birth of Basic Writing from 1969 to…

This article discusses a method of grammar feedback in Basic Writing that asks students to determine the extent of grammar feedback the instructor provides on their writing. Student-directed grammar feedback acknowledges students' agency and ownership of their own languaging and aligns with translingual writing pedagogy. Drawing on students'…

If assessment is about improving learning and facilitating better teaching through research and helping students learn what higher education purports to value, then the often-invisible institutional barriers that do not always embrace the ways in which classroom assessment can teach an institution about student learning within individual…

Since the 1970s, legacy Basic Writing systems have survived despite growing resistance grounded in an increasing awareness of their troubling roots and harmful effects. In this article, two 2017 basic writing students and their teacher conduct a mixed-method "postmortem" examination of the now eliminated zero-credit course and writing…

This article argues that the national trend to replace developmental writing programs with mainstreaming and corequisite courses presents an important opportunity to reconsider writing goals and assessment practices for all students. This insight emerges in part from data collected over several semesters at one community college, which showed that…

The study developed a model of linguistic constructs to predict writing quality for college basic writers and analyzed how those constructs changed following instruction. Analysis used a corpus of argumentative essays from a quasi-experimental, instructional study with 252 students (MacArthur, Philippakos, & Ianetta, 2015) that found large…

Since high school students are failing to master writing proficiency, developmental writing programs at the college level have become increasingly necessary. This article explains the lack of readiness with which students are entering college and the workplace, examines the reasons students are having trouble writing, and describes elements of…

In order to better understand how to use assessment productively in the basic writing classroom, I asked the question "How do basic writers perceive the assessment process?" The research reported on in this dissertation led to the conclusion that basic writers at Dona Ana Community College perceive and value each part of the assessment…

In this article, the authors discuss what works for them in their first-year composition classes. In order to promote critical thinking and goal setting within her developmental writing and first-year composition classes, Susan Plachta begins their first class session by completing the standard introductions and syllabus discussions and finishes…

A developmental writing scale for timed essay-writing performance was created on the basis of automatically computed indicators of writing fluency, word choice, and conventions of standard written English. In a large-scale data collection effort that involved a national sample of more than 12,000 students from 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grade,…

Many students have difficulty in educational and employment settings because they have failed to master basic writing skills. Multiple-baseline across-tasks designs were used to evaluate the effects of the Comprehensive Writing Program (CWP), a multicomponent intervention, on the writing performance of all students (n = 17) from 3 9th-grade…