Underprepared students often need assistance building writing skills and maintaining confidence in their abilities and potential. The authors share the philosophy, pedagogy, and experience of freshman developmental education and the writing center at a four-year, private, not-for-profit urban college. They describe high-impact educational…

Driven by faculty-based action research, redesigned residential and online courses, and changes to placement testing, Rasmussen College increased its developmental education pass rates by double digits while decreasing the number and percentage of students who require remedial coursework. Like many institutions of higher education, Rasmussen…

In fall 2013, Career and Technical Education (CTE)-focused composition classes were piloted to accommodate Leeward Community College's requirement for college-level composition for students in the CTE majors. The first CTE-focused class was an accelerated developmental education reading and writing course for students placing two steps below…

Correct grammar is important for precise, accurate, academic prose, but the traditional skills-based approach to teaching grammar is not effective if the goal is good writing. The sentence-combining approach shows promise. However, sentence modeling is more likely to produce strong writing and enhance reading comprehension. Through sentence…

This paper is based on a presentation made at NADE 2016, in Anaheim, California, entitled "Turnitin--An Extraordinary Teaching and Feedback Tool in the Writing Classroom" which discussed the value and benefits of using Turnitin (TII), a subscription-based software/website available to universities that serves as an audio-visual feedback…

This article explores how a composition program at a minority serving, Midwestern university used an accelerated learning approach in its general education composition course sequence. Using research in the area of literacy theory and developmental education, as well as assessment data, the program designed a two-course general education…

The issue of preparation of the nation's student body has many facets, including the preparation of faculty charged with their instruction. This article reviews findings from a single-case study of community college English faculty members' perceived self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) using best instructional practices, as identified by the…

The Silent Socratic Dialogue (SSD) writing warm-up technique places college students in a dialogic setting in which they construct the texts that explore, inform, and challenge each other through a succession of questions and answers. It validates students' voices, ideas, and interactions as worthy of study while engaging them in the…

This hypothetical case of a freshman wrestling with her identity as an English user demonstrates that the old categories of native and non-native speaker do not adequately describe today's college population. The lack of informed strategies in college writing courses to deal with students possessing different degrees of proficiency in English…

Teaching developmental writing courses is a high-wire act, complicated by its need to balance both rudimentary skill-building and college-level writing preparation. However, many developmental writing instructors spend most of their time on the former, focusing on rote memorization of grammar rules and sentence skills development, which often…

Researchers from Kaplan University present findings from a media-rich feedback pilot program that targets students from developmental writing courses. One study of student reactions reveals how screencasting feedback encouraged more formative, holistic feedback and students' awareness of writing process, audience, and revision. A second study…

The article focuses on using creative play in the developmental writing classroom to enhance student engagement. Theories that support the use of play in the classroom are briefly described. Several teaching techniques are shared, including developing metaphors as part of teaching a grammar unit, acting out readings from novels, and using poetry…

This article presents strategies for teaching a co-sat class, a class wherein students who place into two different levels of developmental English are taught concurrently in one classroom with one instructor. The article describes organizing the course on a framework of shared topics, includes a model for managing classroom activities, and gives…

Using technology in a developmental classroom, particularly a classroom platform such as WebCT, can help provide a sense of community in a developmental writing course. The rationale for designing a hybrid developmental writing course is discussed as well as the ways in which students perceived themselves as "real writers" as a result of…

This article briefly surveys the literature on ways that developmental writing students learn; reports on student learning style research carried out in developmental writing classrooms at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and Southwest Texas Junior College, using the "Productivity Environmental Preference Survey"; suggests specific…