Responding to the call for embracing mêtis in the classroom, this piece puts scholarship on embodiment and emergent gameplay in conversation with one another to explore a potential means of cultivating mêtic intelligence in the composition classroom by empirically examining how the open world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ( BOTW ) scaffolds mêtic intelligence and encourages mêtic strategies in its players. Founded in Jay Dolmage’s understanding of mêtis as a means to turn the tables on those with greater bie (brute strength) and Karen Kopelson’s use of mêtis as a means of subtle resistance, this piece takes a mixed methods approach and utilizes interview data to see what design elements of BOTW may be able to be brought into composition course design to help cultivate cunning in our students both inside and beyond the classroom.

This article illustrates how we incorporated discourse-based interviews (DBIs) into a mixed-methods research study informed by the heuristics of institutional ethnography (IE). As the first stage of a longitudinal study designed to understand what, where, and how writing means across our university, our research used DBIs in a writing center to uncover peer tutors’ tacit personal knowledge about writing. In tandem with IE methodology, DBIs enabled us to understand how conceptions of writing shape peer tutors’ written work and tutoring practice in relation and/or resistance to the programmatic goals of the center. The study demonstrates how the use of DBIs within IE projects facilitates dynamic exploration of the co-constitutive and socially constructed nature of tacit writing knowledge and institutionally coordinated work processes. Our research design and methodological considerations generate strategies and approaches for incorporating variations of DBIs into mixed-methods research.

Students’ completion of a self-efficacy appraisal inventory focusing on the eight habits of mind outlined in the CWPA’s Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing can help individual students reflect and improve upon the specific and individualized learning approaches that will assist them as they transition into a postsecondary writing classroom. A recent IRB-approved-as-exempt study directed first-year writing students to rate their confidence in how well they were able to engage in specific writing-related actions. Respondents included 162 students from multiple sections of a first-year writing course taught in two semesters: 75 from 15 different Fall 2019 sections of a first-year writing course and 87 participants from 6 different Spring 2020 sections of the same course. The study found participating students perceived themselves strongest at executing writing-based courses of action related to Responsibility, Openness, and Persistence and weakest at executing courses of action related to Flexibility and Creativity. In light of students’ efficacy self-percepts pertaining to the eight habits of mind, the specific “writing, reading, and critical analysis experiences” in which students should engage include (1) assignments that encourage students to creatively and reiteratively compose, reimagine, and recompose pieces using a variety of modalities and conventions; and (2) assignments that encourage students to engage in data-driven metacognitive reflective writing.

Despite statistical evidence that a majority of faculty, students, and WPAs are impacted by trauma, the field has yet to establish a trauma-informed approach to writing program administration. As a result, WPAs are left to operate without evidence-based, field-specific, best practices as we remain mindful of our own trauma reflexes and careful with the trauma responses of our constituents. In an effort to help move the field forward, this article incorporates concepts of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma while unpacking data of the types of trauma impacting students, faculty, and WPAs. Moreover, this article proposes steps to take in order to (1) add our voices to the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies and (2) establish intersectional trauma-informed WPA leadership practices specific to higher educational settings.

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students’ development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, Reflection ; White). One assumption about the value of reflection has been that skill in reflective writing also has a positive connection with lower-order writing skills, such as sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. However, evidence to confirm this assumption has been limited to small qualitative studies or deferred to future longitudinal research (Downs and Wardle). In the mixed methods assessment study presented here, we first investigated this assumption empirically by measuring the relationship between evaluative skills embedded in the genre of reflective writing and lower-order writing skills that follow sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. We found a high-positive correlation between reflection and writing assessment scores. We then used qualitative methods to describe key features of higher- and lower-scored reflective essays.

Enrollments of international students are at very high levels in the U.S., a development that has altered the demographics of first-year composition classes in recent years. Nonetheless, writing instructors and administrators often know little about these students’ backgrounds, which can make it difficult to design pedagogies that are responsive to their specific needs. Drawing on data from a qualitative, longitudinal study with a cohort of undergraduate international students, this article addresses three interrelated issues: 1) pre-college writing experiences of international students in both their first languages and English; 2) key points of challenge and discovery for international students as they enter the culture of U.S. academic writing; and 3) possible pedagogic interventions designed to better support international students. Situating findings in relation to recent scholarship on students’ transitions from high school to college, the article explores ways in which the experiences of international students are both similar to and different than those of their U.S.-educated peers.

Researching writing-related dispositions is of critical concern for understanding writing transfer and writing development. However, as a field we need better tools and methods for identifying, tracking, and analyzing dispositions. This article describes a failed attempt to code for five key dispositions (attribution, self-efficacy, persistence, value, and self-regulation) in a longitudinal, mixed methods, multi-institutional study that otherwise successfully coded for other writing transfer factors. We present a “study of a study” that examines our coders’ attempts to identify and code dispositions and describes broader understandings from those findings. Our findings suggest that each disposition presents a distinct challenge for coding and that dispositions, as a group, involve not only conceptual complexity but also cultural, psychological, and temporal complexity. For example, academic literacy learning and dispositions intersect with systems of socio-economic, political, and cultural inequity and exploitation; this entwining presents substantial problems for coders. Methodological considerations for understanding the complexity of codes, effectively and accurately coding for dispositions, considering the four complexities, and understanding the interplay between the individual and the social are explored. We describe how concepts from literacy studies scholarship may help shape writing transfer scholarship concerning dispositions and transfer research more broadly.

This profile presents New Jersey City University’s Writing Assessment Program from its creation in 2002 to its elimination in 2017. The program arose as an attempt to raise the writing skills of the diverse, first-generation teacher certification candidates in the College of Education. Despite political missteps, the program gained greater administrative support in 2009, and in this second stage, the program capitalized on greater institutional support to use data-driven analysis to inform policy. In 2014, however, New Jersey moved to require the Praxis CORE, and the Writing Assessment Program became obsolete. This profile discusses the many ways in which a locally developed, student-centered, and instruction-driven assessment program can raise student skills and the losses involved in a shift from local to national assessment.

As multimodal writing continues to shift and expand in the era of Big Data, writing studies must confront the new challenges and possibilities emerging from data mining, data visualization, and data-driven arguments. Often collected under the broad banner of data literacy , students’ experiences of data visualization and data-driven arguments are far more diverse than the phrase data literacy suggests. Whether it is the quantitative rhetoric of “likes” in entertainment media, the mapping of social sentiment on cable news, the use of statistical predictions in political elections, or the pervasiveness of the algorithmic phrase “this is trending,” data-driven arguments and their accompanying visualizations are now a prevalent form of multimodal writing. Students need to understand how to read data-driven arguments, and, of equal importance, produce such arguments themselves. In Writing through Big Data, a newly developed writing course, students confront Big Data’s political and ethical concerns head-on (surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic filtering) by collecting social network data and producing their own data-driven arguments.

While composition studies researchers have examined the ways social media are impacting our lives inside and outside of the classroom, less attention has been given to the ways in which social media—specifically Social Network Sites (SNSs)—may enhance our own research methods and methodologies by helping to combat research participant attrition and build a community around a research project. In this article, we share some of the successes and shortfalls of using SNSs for research purposes, based on our own experiences using Facebook in the context of our writing program’s Longitudinal Study of Student Writers. Specifically, we present five considerations related to the integration of Facebook for research—Building a Community, Sharing Study Data, Constructing Identity, Understanding Analytics, and Conducting Usability Testing—and we discuss how these methods can be extended to other SNSs.

In this profile we describe changes to the composition program at Missouri University of Science and Technology, prompted by the hiring of the university’s first writing program administrator (WPA). We describe our efforts to implement evidence-based best practices in undergraduate writing courses in a context where very little program specific evidence was available. We also describe how challenges of effecting change at a university largely composed of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students has meant that many of the changes have been framed by the spirit of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives. Several new methods of assessment have been introduced to the program, including instructor feedback, student surveys, and skills tests. Allowing assessment to drive standardization has begun a process of measuring the transfer of student knowledge we believe other departments will find interesting. We close by outlining unresolved issues and ongoing challenges as the program moves forward.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).