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…

Structural practices used by community colleges to assess, place, and teach students are undergoing transformation. Many recent changes have been shaped by the idea that barriers to success, combined with traditional policies, work against helping students pass through the developmental writing pathway. This article's purpose was to investigate…

The process of digital storytelling allows basic writers to take a personal narrative and translate it into a multimodal and multidimensional experience, motivating a diverse group of writers with different learning styles to engage more creatively and meaningfully in the writing process. Digital storytelling has the capacity to contextualize…

The education of under-prepared college students is a topic that interested and motivated this researcher to conduct a study on learning communities and measuring change in writing apprehension and locus of control of developmental students at a community college. Higher education is generally viewed as a place for the intellectually elite.…

Developmental writing programs often include a small number of students who seem unable to respond to instruction and to acquire sufficient writing skills to move on. Many common writing difficulties reflect ambivalence about expression. A core issue is that expression is related to trust in the anticipated response to what is expressed. An…

This article examines the relationship between the use of online tutoring sessions and student success in developmental writing courses. The results suggest a statistically significant difference between the success rates, as measured by course grades, of those students who use the tutoring service and those who do not, thus suggesting the…

As students enter college, English composition instructors complain that students lack essential grammar basics to create clear, coherent pieces of writing. The number of students requiring developmental coursework at institutions has increased significantly since the institution of mandatory placement in 2000. In the face of the challenge to…

Community college developmental English students passed Composition I at a higher rate than did non-developmental students, confirming the effectiveness of developmental English courses. However, the lack of a significant relationship between placement test scores and students' grades in all writing-intensive courses raised concerns about…