Teacher Geneviève DeBose Akinnagbe discusses her school's--and her own--improvement in the area of writing instruction. While she is a strong believer in teacher-led change, she says the change in this case was mainly the result of the school's becoming more intentional, at an organizational level, about the teaching of writing. The progress truly…

What started as a mission to help the author's journalism students develop employability skills, opened up their practice to the area of 'mindful play'. From this, the author started to develop a creative, holistic and student-centred teaching and learning strategy, using simple, workable interventions to stimulate dialogic learning, strengthen…

The prospect of "big data" at once evokes optimistic views of an information-rich future and concerns about surveillance that adversely impacts our personal and private lives. This overview article explores the implications of big data in education, focusing by way of example on data generated by student writing. We have chosen writing…

The benefits of a peer review process tend to be evaluated in terms of improvements to students' writing. But are there reasons why instructors might want to implement peer review into their courses over and above writing development? In this study, we collected data from 30 university students on their perceptions of a peer review process.…

Writing is an essential skill and outcome for academic and professional success, but the call for evidence-based practices and instructional differentiation to support all student-writers' needs has yet to be sufficiently addressed. The Common Core State Standards' Initiative resurfaced a focus on writing instruction and brought attention to…

Education consultant Samantha Bennett describes an inquiry unit in which 2nd graders practice the habits of lepidopterists to learn about butterflies and to create a literary nonfiction story that incorporated their butterfly research. She takes the reader through the teacher's process of planning this unit, including choosing the "4…

The emergence of big data in educational contexts has led to new data-driven approaches to support informed decision making and efforts to improve educational effectiveness. Digital traces of student behavior promise more scalable and finer-grained understanding and support of learning processes, which were previously too costly to obtain with…

This article analyzes the decline of linguistics in rhetoric and composition PhD programs in terms of the "linguistic memory" (Trimbur) of composition. Since the field of linguistics once offered the primary means for composition to address the structural, psychological, sociohistorical, and cultural dimensions of language in student…

This study examines the student writer perspective of a first-year composition program's student learning outcomes. Student descriptions of learning are a valuable, yet often overlooked data source. The student voice broadens a first-year composition program's outcomes-based, student learning assessment process as program assessment data is often…

Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically…

To address graduate writing pedagogy in technical communication, this article reports on a study of 14 award-winning dissertations in the field. By treating dissertations as cultural artifacts constitutive of the educational contexts in which they are authored, this study reads dissertation methodology sections as research narratives to understand…

As localized assessments confirm national findings that undergraduates struggle to integrate resources into research-based compositions effectively, data at one comprehensive public university indicate library sessions improve students' ability to locate and evaluate information, but students continue to struggle with the "use" component…

One task of Feiman-Nemser's teacher learning model--develop tools and dispositions to study teaching--frames how we organized learning opportunities during teacher preparation. We explored how and to what degree preservice teachers used teacher inquiry to analyze linguistically diverse students' work through an asset-based lens, beyond deficit…

Process and product are always in tension. In authentic writing, they can be messy and hard to assess. Because writing is recursive and generative, every word written opens new possibilities. Not only that, but writing is influenced by ability, time allowed, task definition, rhetorical situation, relationship to reading, and helpful thinking…

This paper assesses and compares the prevalence of plagiarism across different student and assignment characteristics at a university in Vietnam, using the similarity index reported by the text-matching software Turnitin as a proxy measure of plagiarism on a sample of 681 student papers. The findings present a level of match higher than reported…