Online first-year writing courses, with all of their promise, still maintain alarmingly low retention and student satisfaction rates, driving online curriculum designers to take another look at ways to increase both retention and satisfaction. To replicate the high rates of face-to-face classes, we must revisit and revise our approach to communication in the first-year writing online classroom. Think about it: The online classroom has abandoned a mainstay in education for thousands of years - synchronous communication. Why have we been so quick to dispose of it? Are we now paying the price? This research will provide additional value to the existing body of knowledge through analyzing the findings of several studies and determining if a causal link exists between synchronous instructor / student communication and student satisfaction and retention rates in post-secondary first-year online composition courses. The research will also examine if the student's perceived level of teacher presence impacts student satisfaction and retention rates. From this analysis, this thesis will also draw conclusions and make recommendations regarding professional development policies and best practices regarding synchronous communication in the first-year online composition course.

This project presents results from a year-long teacher-research study of 50 students in two sections of first-year composition. The goal of this project is to create writing pedagogy in touch with first-year students' everyday worlds and to represent students as people who enter the classroom with literacies, knowledge, and resources. Using funds of knowledge methodology, this project shows how to use students' existing literacy practices and rhetorical skills to move them to deeper levels of critical literacy. Employing frame analysis, this research shows how contemporary consumerist ideologies inform students' orientations towards their education and demonstrates how to use these ideologies as a bridge to getting students to both question the meaning of a college degree and take an active role in their education. To show some of the tensions that emerge for students moving between the spaces of student life, this project uses activity theory to compare the everyday practices of lecture-hall classes and composition classes. "Third Space" theory is suggested as a way for students and teachers to leave familiar practices and scripts to question larger assumptions about the creation of knowledge. Activity theory is also used to examine students' experiences in campus communities, where it is argued that students feel they are engaging in more authentic learning experiences, though they retain some of the attitudes they have towards their academic work in these communities. Combining activity theory, pedagogical action research, and principles of student-centered teaching, conclusions argue for a paradigm for "student engagement research," a methodology for teacher-researchers to both study students' everyday lives and incorporate student culture into the teaching of writing.

This thesis explores the potential for creating a composition syllabus that presents a model of good writing, is an enthusiastic invitation to the discipline, and provides a clear roadmap to success, not only for the course, but also for the students’ college career. This is especially useful for an increasingly diverse student community that arrives to college with a varying knowledge of the academic institution, with its specialized language and systems. The project explores the existing research on syllabus crafting, uses current composition studies and a survey of English 100 students to interrogate the rhetorical situation of the author’s own syllabus, and finally reflects upon a section-bysection revision of that syllabus. With a present and positive voice from the teacher that includes students in the process of their own learning, a dynamic composition syllabus can initiate trusting relationships in the classroom, and support greater success for the students.

Though scholars have discussed how reflective writing can benefit students in college-level writing classes, little research has focused on students’ perceptions of this kind of writing. This study examines the curriculum of a particular first-year writing course, as well as student reflective writing that was created for the class. Research questions focus on how students used reflective writing to articulate their understandings of audience and academic discourse, two curricular concerns that tend to be prevalent in first-year writing courses. To answer these questions, I studied examples of student reflective essays, conducted interviews with eight students, and maintained researcher field notes. I analyzed this data using discourse analysis to understand how the institution constructed itself, students, and me. I also explored how students used language to engage in particular building tasks associated with writing for particular audiences and engaging in particular academic discourses. My findings suggest that students perceive that reflective writing can lead to opportunities for expanded dialogues between students and teachers, and can facilitate student learning of academic discourse.

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This study sought to form joint conceptions of success by creating a habits of mind orientational framework drawn from university administrative and practitioner scholarship and theory. Previous literature directed at university writing higher-level administrators and practitioners in first-year writing programs and writing centers was largely engaged in battle for control of determining what success means for incoming writers and how programs can support this version of success. This framework served as the basis for this study’s methodologies for the collection as well as analysis of data. Data was collected from twelve university stakeholders who support freshmen writers through first-year writing programs and writing centers at a small Catholic university in the Northeast. These data were collected using three different methods: semi-structured interviews, ranking activities and retroactive reflections. I found that the members from the three groups of university writing stakeholders shared either cognitive, interpersonal or intrapersonal orientations when conceiving what habits make writers successful and what programmatic mechanisms can help writers form these habits. These three groups did not, however, largely prioritize writers possessing or learning the same habits within each domain. The main commonality between groups sharing a cognitive domain orientation are that the habits they privileged look to preserve conventions grounded in a white Western rhetorical tradition. Yet, writing instructors and tutors mostly do not explicitly teach these conventions because they are expected to have been acquired in high school. Thus, students of color and/or from low income backgrounds are pushed to prepare themselves to meet these conventional expectations and abandon their own culture’s priorities and conventions if they are to succeed. Groups that had inter - and intrapersonal domain orientations privileged addressing each incoming writer’s individual needs through collaboration or teaching them an actionable process that can be continuously used in each new writing context. Based on these findings, I assert that utilizing a habits of mind orientational framework can benefit transitioning writers because university writing stakeholders can identify a single set of habits from each domain that can be consistently emphasized and reinforced through programmatic mechanisms. / English

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Why do so many students confuse good writing with simply error-free writing, and what can writing instructors do about it? In order to answer this question, the present study first undertakes an exploration of the different meanings associated with grammar and how those definitions have influenced composition instruction. These influences range from an over-emphasis on grammar in the first half of the twentieth century to allowing it to disappear almost completely from the composition curriculum in the second half of the century. However, because research demonstrates that students over this same time period make errors in writing at a fairly constant rate, the present study investigated how writing instructors might target their teaching in order to strategically eliminate or decrease error from student writing while still maintaining composition classes focused on writing rather than grammar. A survey of frequent errors was constructed based on findings from Connors & Lunsford's 1988 study and Lunsford & Lunsford's 2008 study of error frequency; following Hairston's 1981 study, the survey also focused on error egregiousness. The survey was sent to samples from three different university populations: faculty, first-year writing students, and advanced writing students. Faculty's identification of errors and their seriousness is compared to that of students. The results of the survey help composition instructors target what to teach based on what students already know and don't know about error and its relative seriousness. The study offers suggestions for teaching the identified taxonomy of the most frequent, most serious errors; it also calls for more research in order to continue building the data instructors use to justify pedagogy.

Current First Year Writing research seeks to address the need to help students meet the Council of Writing Program Administrators objectives on source evaluation while also changing current pedagogy methods (Meola, 2004; Ostenson 2014; SHEG, 2016; Wineburg & McGrew, 2017). This paper seeks to compare two different source evaluation pedagogies, YSearch and Decision Based Learning, taught by Brigham Young University’s library to determine which module is more effective at teaching students source evaluation skills. To answer these questions, this study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods utilizing a quasi-experimental design by conducting an open comparison between the two pedagogy modules.

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