Abstract
This article describes a revision of a first-year writing program curriculum using the pillars of the Reimagining the First-Year Program. The authors adapted principles related to mindset and habits of mind from both college retention scholarship and composition scholarship. After developing a research project in order to understand what elements of mindset correlate with readiness for credit-bearing writing courses, the authors created a multiple measures placement system for enrolling students in a credit-bearing first-year writing course with co-requisite support.
Highlights
The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) is a four-year comprehensive institution which serves around 10,500 students (9,000+ undergrad); UWL occupies a somewhat privileged position in the UW System, as it maintains high admissions standards and is consistently ranked highly by US News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges list; in 2018, it was ranked as the number one comprehensive campus in the UW System and in the top four among regional universities in the Midwest
The average number of students scoring below the 355 cut-off for the whole UW System is 6%, so UWL serves far fewer underprepared students than other UW schools, and even those students who might be categorized as remedial here have academic performance markers that would qualify them for credit-bearing English courses at many institutions
Because of these statistics and the growing move in composition pedagogy to eliminate non-credit-bearing remedial courses, we have been working on a proposal to mainstream all students into ENG 110 and create a co-requisite support course for students who might have previously been placed in ENG 050
Summary
The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) is a four-year comprehensive institution which serves around 10,500 students (9,000+ undergrad); UWL occupies a somewhat privileged position in the UW System, as it maintains high admissions standards (second only to the anchor campus at Madison) and is consistently ranked highly by US News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges list; in 2018, it was ranked as the number one comprehensive campus in the UW System and in the top four among regional universities in the Midwest. The average number of students scoring below the 355 cut-off for the whole UW System is 6%, so UWL serves far fewer underprepared students than other UW schools, and even those students who might be categorized as remedial here have academic performance markers that would qualify them for credit-bearing English courses at many institutions Because of these statistics and the growing move in composition pedagogy to eliminate non-credit-bearing remedial courses, we have been working on a proposal to mainstream all students into ENG 110 and create a co-requisite support course for students who might have previously been placed in ENG 050. The university’s participation in RFY coincided with our plans for changing our BW program and offered us the opportunity to pilot the mainstreaming of a small number of students into the credit-bearing FYW course, using the revised UWL 100 as our co-requisite support course Both the common cohort of students -- first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color -- and the common goal of retention beyond the first year made the partnership between these programs ideal.
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