Developmental composition courses serve a sizable and growing number of Generation 1.5 students, or long-term U.S. resident language learners, and it is believed that language challenges may be part of Generation 1.5 writers' difficulty in controlling the academic register. The current study investigates possible similarities and differences…

Basic writing and reading students are scared. More than the unfamiliar places, faces, new methods and serious consequences of it all, they are afraid of words. Even if they successfully complete remediation, move on to English 101 and advance to upper courses in other disciplines, our students often face monstrous texts, which they have precious…

The course described here was designed especially for students enrolled in a collaborative program between Texas A&M University-Commerce and Konkuk University in South Korea. This course was created specifically for students who did not earn a qualifying score on a standardized placement exam required of all first-year students for enrollment…

This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding "Ayers v. Fordice," one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper articles and…

This design research project developed and evaluated curriculum for developmental writing classes in community colleges. The core of the curriculum was self-regulated strategy instruction, which has been shown to be effective with adolescents who are struggling as writers. In the curriculum, students learned strategies for planning, drafting, and…

This article challenges faculty members and administrators to rethink current definitions of remediation. First year college students are increasingly placed into basic writing courses due to a perceived inability to use English grammar correctly, but it must be acknowledged that all students will encounter the need for remediation as they attempt…

Despite the growing linguistic diversity of students in today's community college writing classes, there has been little research on the unique problems that instructors face when students from differing second linguistic and cultural backgrounds populate the same classrooms. This study explores the extent to which four community college writing…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…

This paper presents the findings from a follow-up quantitative analysis of the Community College of Baltimore County's Accelerated Learning Program (ALP). The results suggest that among students who enroll in the highest level developmental writing course, participation in ALP is associated with substantially better outcomes in terms of English…

The current study examined differences in student performance and retention rates for those who completed remedial reading or remedial writing courses and those who did not in a private university in South Florida. International students also were compared to non-international students on academic performance and retention rates. The conceptual…

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.…

The purpose of this case study was to describe the role of teacher knowledge in the instructional methods of a community college developmental literacy instructor and determine in what ways that knowledge may have impacted the perceptions of the student participants regarding their authority over their academic progress in the class. Therefore,…

This paper presents the findings from a quantitative analysis of the Community College of Baltimore County's Accelerated Learning Program (ALP). Under ALP, students placed into upper-level developmental writing are "mainstreamed" into English 101 classes and simultaneously enrolled in a companion ALP course (taught by the same instructor) that…

In four articles adapted from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research Report Series, Issue 2 of ETS Research Spotlight provides a small taste of the range of assessment-related research capabilities of the ETS Research and Development Division. Those articles cover assessment-related research aimed at developing models of student learning,…