Scholarship

This page serves as a database for OWC-related scholarship. You can filter results by using the tags below or the search bar to the right.

Have corrections or scholarship suggestions? Contact mentoring@onlinewritingcenters.org

On Podcasting, Program Development, and Intergenerational Thinking (2021)

I spent my first year of college as a music business major, a wannabe audio engineer. Thanks to two main factors, that major didn’t take. First, I learned audio engineering wasn’t just being present while cool music happened. Second, I took first year writing, which convinced me to become an English major (more on that in a bit). Despite the major switch, my audio experience proved an unexpected asset when I began pursuing a PhD in English at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011.

Retention and Persistence in Writing Programs: A Survey of Students Repeating First-Year Writing (2021)

Student retention and persistence is increasingly prioritized by state and local policies as well as national scorecards and rankings—however, the policies that politicians and administrators undertake to improve university metrics tend to ignore the realities faced by students at the heart of our institutions. Drawing on a survey/interview project involving 67 students repeating first-year writing classes at a diverse institution in the Southwestern US, this article takes a student-centered approach to understand the reasons they drop first-year writing, such as health concerns, lack of engagement with the curriculum, and their incompatibility with online learning or poorly taught online classes.

Revising Reflection for Results in Teacher Research (2021)

In this article, we argue that using students’ reflective writing to understand specific aspects of their classroom experience requires that researchers systematically integrate into the curriculum reflections that responsibly attend to both students’ learning and the focus of classroom research. Informed by recently published articles on reflection and collaborative writing and learning, this argument contributes to recent Composition Forum discussions (e.g. VanKooten; Fiscus; Winzenreid et al.; Jankens, Learning How to Ask).

Assignments and Expectations: The Role of Genre and Faculty Expectations in Transfer (2021)

As WPAs at a research institution without a WAC program, we embarked on this project to learn about the types of writing prompts faculty across the disciplines assign and their expectations for student writing. Although our first-year composition program is genre-based and focuses on teaching for transfer, we did not know what genres other faculty assigned nor which writing skills they hoped students could apply to their assignments.

Writing center blogs project (2021)

The original purpose of this project was to gather in one place a comprehensive list of writing center blogs that could be shared with tutors and writing center professionals. We made this list publicly available on the blog of the San José State University Writing Center, The Write Attitude.

What do first-year students find reliable in online sources? (2021)

It has become almost rote to say that now, more than ever, students need to understand how to navigate web content to find verifiable and reliable information sources. While the data-collection portion of this study took place in the aftermath of the 2016 American presidential election, with students and the public increasingly confused about #fakenews and what media sources to trust to disseminate information (Rainie & Anderson, 2017), structural revisions of this article took place during the COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing racial protests in the United States.

The Benefits and Limitations of Online Peer Feedback: Instructors’ Perception of a Regional Campus Online Writing Lab (2020)

The socioeconomics of the working-class area where our open- admission regional campus is situated have resulted in a struggle to prepare and retain our underprepared students. The campus tutoring center is central to our retention efforts; to address the needs of our population, we offer both face-to-face and online tutoring. The article reports the findings of an empirical study that looks at writing instructors’ perception of these tutoring services, with emphasis on the online component.