The current economic and political environment has increased the pressure on higher education to deliver education that is cost-effective, standardized, and accessible. Summer bridge programs have traditionally been one of the economical ways to increase the access and retention of non-traditional, first-generation, or at-risk students. Retention…

This article looks at best practices in basic writing instruction in terms of non-traditional audiences and writerly authority. Much conventional wisdom discourages participation in service-learning projects for basic writers because of the assumption that their writing is not yet ready to "go public." Countering this line of thinking, the author…

This article discusses exchanges between a number of scholars during the 1990s centering on Min-Zhan Lu's controversial essay "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" In some ways, "Conflict and Struggle" blazed a trail for later work in "hybrid" or "mixed" forms of academic writing while at the same time igniting…

This study examined the student-level and instruction-level predictors of narrative writing fluency and quality. Participants included 120 third-grade students from 13 classrooms. Student predictors included measures of reading, handwriting, spelling, IQ, grammatical understanding, and gender. Instructional predictors focused on the amount of time…

In this article, I describe how policy changes instituted by our State Board of Education prompted the composition faculty at Boise State University to develop a Stretch program. Our goal was to support basic writing students by linking two writing courses (one of which is non-credit-bearing) , thus allowing students to remain with the same…

This article addresses the issue of basic writing, demonstrating how one university's basic writing program acts as a steward of writing. The assumption that basic writers only consume resources rather than contribute to academic excellence is rejected. What links the author responses to this issue is a publication of student writing entitled…

For more than two decades the California State University (CSU) has been trying unsuccessfully to "reduce the need for remediation" on its campuses, primarily through initiatives aimed at high schools. This article examines a basic writing reform project, San Francisco State's Integrated Reading/Writing Program, in the context of the…

This article describes two very different projects undertaken in the same basic writing course: collaborative ethnography and ACT test prep. At first glance, it appears that the work on collaborative ethnography accomplished our goal of creating better, more self-conscious writers while the work on test prep achieved our goal of creating better…

This article examines the challenges of teaching basic writing today as students come to the classroom with the basic fluency of digital natives but have the same need for learning writing and critical thinking skills that has traditionally marked basic writers. While most basic writers are adept at accessing information digitally, they are not as…

This report examines the importance and efficacy of oral language, literacy, mathematics, and science preschool curricula and how these curricula can be improved through alignment with research on early childhood development and learning. Detailed, research-driven recommendations are presented for what preschool-aged children should be learning in…

This paper presents a qualitative study that used classroom observations, faculty interviews, and student interviews to investigate the meaning and importance of seven non-cognitive variables to a cohort of developmental writing students at an urban community college. The variables studied included finances, study management, college surroundings,…

Arizona State University's basic writing "Stretch Program" has now been in existence for more than ten years. Statistical data for nearly 8,000 "Stretch Program" students continues to indicate that the program helps a range of at-risk students succeed. This is true, also, for students from under-represented groups, who comprise…

At a time when many teenagers are consumed by such activities as text-messaging, blogging, and social networking, more middle and high school students than in the past have mastered the formal "basic" writing skills needed to express ideas or share information, national assessment results released last week show. But just small proportions--33…

This study examined the relative contributions of measures of Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) cognitive abilities in explaining writing achievement. Drawing from samples that covered the age range of 7 to 18 years, simultaneous multiple regression was used to regress scores from the Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ III; Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) that…

This study examined the relationships between first semester participation in a community college developmental writing course and persistence and goal attainment. The study examined whether developmental writing course participants completed more of their credits, enrolled for more semesters, and completed degree/certificates and/or transferred…