First-Year Writing Research Articles

Peer Review Practice, Student Identity, and Success in a First-Year Writing Pilot Curriculum: An Equity-Minded Analysis

Peer Review Practice, Student Identity, and Success in a First-Year Writing Pilot Curriculum: An Equity-Minded Analysis

International Students in First-Year Writing

International Students in First-Year Writing: A Journey Through Socio-Academic Space describes the lived experiences of ten international students enrolled in a first-year writing (FYW) course at an American university.

Re-Imagining the First Year as Catalyst for First-Year Writing Program Curricular Change

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.

Teaching First-Year Writing Through Classics

First-year writing courses can be a challenge for both instructors and students. This paper describes a first-year writing course developed, taught and continuously refined by one classicist. The course combines writing instruction with primary and secondary material relating to the ancient world. Students who might otherwise never take a classics course can thus engage with ancient Greece and Rome. Such a course can extend Classics into other areas of the college curriculum and expand the number of students who learn about antiquity.

First-Year Writing as the Critical Thinking Course: An Interactionist Approach

First-Year Writing as the Critical Thinking Course: An Interactionist Approach

Recognizing Institutional Diversity, Supporting Latinx Students: First-Year Writing Placement and Success at a Small Community Four-Year HSI

Recognizing Institutional Diversity, Supporting Latinx Students: First-Year Writing Placement and Success at a Small Community Four-Year HSI

Teaching First-Year Writing Through Classics

Teaching First-Year Writing Through Classics

The Comparative Benefits of Standalone Email Assignments in the First-Year Legal Writing Curriculum

Many of today’s law school graduates lack the practical skills that they need to thrive as practicing lawyers. As a result, it is incumbent on law schools — and, specifically, legal writing programs — to redouble their efforts to prepare law students for the realities of modern legal practice. And perhaps no feature of modern legal practice has been more striking than the rapid rise of email as a means of professional communication. Driven by its speed, efficiency, and convenience over the traditional, formal memorandum, email is now the most popular way for lawyers to provide legal advice. As a result, teaching effective email practices is no longer optional. After a somewhat slow start, email has received increased attention in legal writing scholarship and pedagogy in recent years, and email assignments have be-come a mainstay in many first-year legal writing programs. But while there have been many suggestions about the types of email assignments that could be used, there has been little principled discussion of which types of email assignments should be used and what purposes the different types of email assignments serve. This Article attempts to contribute to this discussion with several specific goals. First, the Article reiterates the point that email assignments should be an integral part of the first-year legal writing curriculum. Second, it establishes a very basic taxonomy of e-mail assignments and examines the benefits of each type. Third, it argues that relying solely on email assignments that are set in the context of a larger memo assignment may miss opportunities to help students fully develop specific research, analytical, and writing skills that they are likely to need in practice. Lastly, the Article suggests a specific type of email assignment — the “Procedural E-memo” — as an efficient tool for helping students develop a range of practical research, analytical, and writing skills that they are likely to use in sending emails in practice.

Feature: Class Size and First-Year Writing: Exploring the Effects on Pedagogy and Student Perception of Writing Process

This essay describes the process and findings of a class size research project at an access institution.

Productive Uncertainty and Postpedagogical Practice in First-Year Writing

To succeed beyond the writing classroom, students need creative thinking and adaptable, transferable writing and learning strategies, both of which are emphasized by a classroom approach called “postpedagogy.” Postpedagogy emphasizes experimentation and reflection as integral to composing processes, especially digital composing. One feature of postpedagogical classrooms is writing assignments that require students to make a broader range of rhetorical choices and experiment with new approaches, audiences, mediums, and/or technologies. I offer my “definitional text” assignment as an example of one such writing assignment. Though the experimentation encouraged by postpedagogical approaches may lead to initial failures and frustration, such failure can be made productive via intensive, sustained, and specific reflection on composing and learning processes.

The Young Archive and First-Year Writing

This article makes a case for introducing the young archive (combining children's and young-adult literature) into the writing classroom, primarily in the form of school story, to rouse students to rethink and, if necessary, rehabilitate expectations concerning their reading, writing, and intellectual development.

Feature: Beyond Words on the Page: Using Multimodal Composing to Aid in the Transition to First-Year Writing

This article reports on a multimodal podcasting unit conducted during a two-week modified summer bridge program for at-risk incoming first-year students. The examples from student work show how teaching a multimodal genre encourages writers to draw from their prior knowledge of standardized genres learned in high school to effectively transition to college composition.

Citation practices of L2 university students in first-year writing: Form, function, and stance

Abstract: This study reports findings of an analysis of the citation practices of L2 undergraduate students in the context of first-year writing (FYW). Data consist of a corpus of 100 source-based research papers written by L2 students in a FYW course. Taking a multi-perspective analytical approach, we examine L2 undergraduate students' citation practices in terms of surface forms, rhetorical functions, and writer stance. Results indicate that L2 students use a restricted range of reporting structures, and they primarily use sources for attribution function to display their knowledge of the topics. Furthermore, as opposed to taking a strong positive or negative position, the findings show that L2 student writers mainly adopt a non-committal stance by merely acknowledging or distancing themselves from cited materials, suggesting that L2 students are inclined to show deference to the perceived authority of published sources. We conclude with pedagogical options for enhancing L2 university students' citation practices.

Uncovering Student Perceptions of a First-Year Online Writing Course

Abstract This article examined student perceptions of the Writing Program Administrators (WPA) learning outcomes for first-year writing through a fully online first-year writing course. A second research question explored how the course content focused on technology, visual rhetoric, and social media impacted students’ overall perceptions about their learning. The method used in this study is qualitative in nature, based on a Likert-scale survey and end of semester open-ended surveys with students. The findings indicate that students perceived their abilities to improve not only in the four areas delineated by the WPA outcomes, but also through the ability to see writing as the primary method of communication and have more time to reflect in an online environment. Findings also suggest that instructor feedback and relevant course content both positively impact student perceptions of an online course. This article concludes with encouragement for additional research and studies relating to first-year writing courses in an online environment.

A Praxis of Entry: First-Year Writing as the Critical Thinking Course

A Praxis of Entry: First-Year Writing as the Critical Thinking Course

Why Essay? A Question of Genre, Literacy Practices, and First-Year Writing

Why Essay? A Question of Genre, Literacy Practices, and First-Year Writing

A Study of First-Year Writing Program in the U.S. Colleges and Universities

A Study of First-Year Writing Program in the U.S. Colleges and Universities

Navigating Roadblocks: First-Year Writing Challenges through the Lens of the ACRL Framework

Effectively integrating the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy into existing instructional models requires that librarians first understand the host of challenges that many first-year students encounter when conducting research for the first time. This study employs qualitative analysis of semi-structured student interviews to explore how students conceive of and pursue the research process, and how they try to mitigate—and in some cases surmount—the roadblocks they encounter. Although students reported several difficulties, three main roadblocks arose: challenges with understanding academic articles, challenges with the topic/theme of the course, and challenges with navigating the physical space of the library. Our findings demonstrate how students employ a variety of strategies to overcome these obstacles. We engage scholarship on information literacy and the Framework, which elucidates how honoring the affective domain of learning in designing instruction could steer students towards more successful research strategies.

First-Year Students’ Research Challenges: Does Watching Videos on Common Struggles affect Students’ Research Self-Efficacy?

Abstract
 
 Objective – The purpose of this quantitative study was to measure the impact of providing research struggle videos on first-year students’ research self-efficacy. The three-part video series explicated and briefly addressed common first-year roadblocks related to searching, evaluating, and caring about sources. The null hypothesis tested was that students would have similar research self-efficacy scores, regardless of exposure to the video series. 
 
 Methods – The study was a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design. The population included all 22 sections (N = 359) of First-Year Writing affiliated with the FASTrack Learning Community at the University of Mississippi. Of 22 sections, 12 (N = 212) served as the intervention group exposed to the videos, while the other 10 (N = 147) served as the control group. A research self-efficacy pretest – posttest measure was administered to all students. In addition, all 22 sections, regardless of control or intervention status, received a face-to-face one-shot library instruction session. 
 
 Results – As a whole, this study failed to reject the null hypothesis. Students exposed to the research struggle videos reported similar research self-efficacy scores as students who were not exposed to the videos. A significant difference, however, did exist between all students’ pretest and posttest scores, suggesting that something else, possibly the in-person library session, did have an impact on students’ research self-efficacy. 
 
 Conclusion – Although students’ research self-efficacy may have increased due to the presence of an in-person library session, this current research was most interested in evaluating the effect of providing supplemental instruction via struggle videos for first-year students. As this was not substantiated, it is recommended that researchers review the findings and limitations of this current study in order to identify more effective approaches in providing instructional support for first-year students’ research struggles.

Online Peer Review Using Turnitin in First-Year Writing Classes

With the development of PeerMark functions, Turnitin begins to capture researchers’ and instructors’ attention as a novel peer review tool. This article reports an empirical study that examines students’ peer feedback using Turnitin and their perceptions in two First-Year Writing classes, one for mainstream students and the other for ESL students. The participants conducted peer review activities using multiple Turnitin features (e.g., Commenting tools, Composition marks, and PeerMark questions) for two writing assignments–summary & response paper and argumentative paper. Analyses of archived Turnitin peer review records revealed that students provided a majority of revision-oriented feedback, in both global areas (e.g., content, organization, and citation) and local areas (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, mechanics, and format), although variations were identified across both classes and both tasks. Questionnaire survey and interviews indicated that students unanimously reported positive perceptions of Turnitin-based peer feedback. They appreciated distinctive features of Turnitin that facilitated their peer review activities; they also shared the perceived constraints and constructive suggestions. This study further informs affordances of new technologies for online peer review.