Higher education research overlooks the achievement of Asian community college students, possibly due to the stereotypes of Asian students as naturally excelling in academia, perpetuated by the model minority myth. This is concerning, because in California, many of the academic achievements that are used to assess the effectiveness of initiatives,…

Continuous assessment (CA) is believed to have great potential for improving learning in higher education. Students' beliefs about CA are a determining force for optimising CA's formative potential. This study explored 27 Chinese undergraduates' beliefs about CA functions in their college English course through individual semi-structured…

Virtually all community colleges and more than 90 percent of public four-year colleges use the results of placement tests--either alone or in concert with other information--to determine whether students are ready for college-level coursework or need remedial help in math or English. Evidence suggests that placement tests do a poor job of…

Colleges throughout the United States are evaluating the effectiveness of their strategies to place entering students into college-level or developmental education courses. Developmental, or remedial, courses are designed to advance the reading, writing, and math skills of students who are deemed academically underprepared for college-level…

This study determined that the addition of Structured Learning Assistance (SLA) attendance increased passage rates (from 66.5% to 82%) of first year students in English 101 courses. The model predicts first year students' performance in college writing, controlling for variables such as American College Test scores, and gender. A…

This article reports the results of a survey of UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) providers of undergraduate degree programmes in English. The survey solicited HEI providers' views on how well each of the A Levels in English prepares students for degree programmes, and asked which of the three A Levels are included in the entry requirements…

Placement of students entering community colleges would, intuitively, seem like a simple process. Students recently graduating from high school would naturally be ready for college-level coursework and able to enroll in credit-bearing courses from the outset. Unfortunately, myriad research exists illustrating quite the contrary. In fact, the…

This interpretive phenomenological study supported by reflective lifeworld research (Dahlberg, Dahlberg & Nystrom, 2008), explores the lived experiences of six community college English composition teachers. This study asks the following question: "How do community college teachers who have taught both developmental and credit level…

This article describes the development and iterations of the English 0111 Composition Workshop-the Texas Success Initiative (TSI), at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The TSI is a program that determines college-readiness standards in reading, writing, and math. The initial structure of English 0111 was similar to the structure used in…

Studies on gender differences in mobile English learning are in their initial stages. College English IV, designed by a number of professors and engineers in a university in China, serves as a mobile English learning platform. This study aims to determine gender differences in cognitive loads, attitudes, and academic achievements in English…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

This dissertation is an ethnographically-oriented, 18-month study of four Latinx students' experiences across the high school to college writing transition. It contributes to a growing body of empirical research in writing studies that seeks to better understand the school writing experiences of students from historically underrepresented…

This study argues for the importance of analyzing individual students' responses to writing instruction in crafting histories of the field of rhetoric and composition. I engage in an archival study of student writing at the University of Kansas during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, specifically through a genre-based local…

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that…

Stakeholders on Guåhan (Guam) are concerned that many Guåhan public high school graduates may be underprepared for college. In 2018 more than 50 percent of students entering Unibetsedåt Guåhan (University of Guam) and Kulehon Kumunidåt Guåhan (Guam Community College) were placed into developmental math or English courses.1 This study examined…