LaGuardia Community College is pursuing a sustained, multi-layered strategy to place learning, teaching, and cohesive curriculum at the center of a guided learning pathway. Implemented in both general education and disciplinary majors collegewide, our Learning Matters core competencies offer faculty powerful tools they use to design, enact,…

A recent (2015) study conducted by the Society of Human Resource Managers concluded that nearly half of US employers, across industries, believe recent college graduates to be lacking in requisite competencies for communication, broadly, and writing, in particular. This paper describes an advanced writing course in public relations that seeks to…

Drawing on four years of anecdotal data and student feedback on course evaluations, this paper provides a retrospective account of the author's experience with teacher candidates in an elementary writing instruction course as first-time authors of children's books, in particular focusing on a writing workshop approach as an effective pedagogical…

This article explores the design and implementation of the curriculum for City Seminar, an integrated course in the first-year experience at a new community college. This interdisciplinary course focuses on a critical issue that provides content and context for quantitative reasoning (QR), reading, and writing (RW) to strengthen students'…

Alternatives to a solitary testing format can involve students working in teams to arrive at the correct answer. We compared two group assessment methods, cooperative and competitive, to a solitary testing approach. In most comparisons examining the undergraduate respondents' (N = 77) performance, the two group-testing methods were equivalent.…