Research has increasingly addressed first-generation (FG) students both in and outside the center (Baelemian & Feng, 2013; Bond, 2019; Denny et al., 2018; Ward et al., 2012), but there remains a need to address this unique student population from the perspective of critical theory. In a replication study of Bond’s 2019 “‘I Need Help on Many Things, Please’: A Case Study Analysis of First-Generation College Students’ Use of the Writing Center,” we examined the needs and perceptions of self-reported FG students in a writing center at a large, regional, public R2 university in the Midwest. We gathered preexisting digital data from WCOnline, consultants’ postsession notes, and our office of institutional research. Using thematic analysis, we coded, categorized, and compared FG college student and non-first- generation student data to better understand their unique needs. Thereafter, we corroborated our qualitative findings using quantitative analyses, specifically the Pearson chi-square test. Situated within the framework of cultural community wealth, our findings illustrate that FG students bring their own forms of cultural capital to the academy, challenging prior deficit-oriented narratives (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Yosso, 2005). Our study can be used to better address the academic needs of FG college students and to extend replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) writing center research (Driscoll & Wynn Perdue, 2012; Haswell, 2005) into conversations of justice, equity, and inclusion.

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of current and former tutors, we added questions that addressed demographics, multilingualism, and worker conditions. We conducted a mixed methods case study and collected data via surveys and focus group interviews with tutor alumni before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2022). Our findings connect with many results of the original PWTARP and other responses about economic vulnerability and the emotional labor of tutoring. Also, our survey produced many useful findings about issues related to being a contingent worker, including economic pressures, emotional labor, and professional development.

Especially in the wake of the recent pandemic, asynchronous consulting has become increasingly central to writing center work. Yet writing center scholarship has little attended to the significant impact writer input can have on asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges. Drawing on asynchronous consultation data collected before and after our 2019 redesign of our writing center’s asynchronous system, this comparative study examines the specific effect of the writer appointment form on the nature of both writers’ requests for feedback (RFFs) and consultants’ resulting comments. Our findings suggest that differently designed appointments forms can scaffold significantly different kinds of asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges, especially visible in the different emphases writers and consultants put on issues of correctness, clarity, organization, and the writer’s rhetorical situation. We argue that, particularly in the case of asynchronous consulting—which can easily devolve to a “fix-it” model of consulting—it is important for writing center administrators to design asynchronous platforms that encourage both writers and consultants to more explicitly consider how the specific rhetorical features of a writing task can shape revising goals.

Writing center scholars have long debated whether writers are best served by “generalist” tutors trained in writing center pedagogy or “specialist” tutors with insider knowledge about a course’s content or discipline-specific discourse conventions. A potential compromise that has emerged is training tutors in the purposes and features of specific genres. The writing center literature showcases many different approaches to genre training. However, little empirical research, if any, has explored how tutors’ genre knowledge affects session outcomes. The present study used a mixed-methods approach to compare session outcomes for students who worked with generalist and genre-trained tutors. We analyzed pre-consultation and revised literature review drafts to determine whether students who worked with tutors trained in the genre of literature reviews improved their drafts more or revised their drafts differently than students who worked with generalist tutors. Additionally, we performed a qualitative analysis of student reflections about their writing processes to explore how tutor training impacts students’ impressions of their consultations. Findings indicated that students who worked with genre-trained tutors revised their drafts more substantively than did students who worked with generalist tutors. Moreover, students who worked with genre-trained tutors left with notably better and richer impressions of their consultations.

“Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond” blends narrative, mixed methods research, and rhetorical analysis to make a case for the possibilities inherent in homegrown wellness practices that are “communal, political, and rooted in defiance of white supremacy.”

This mixed methods study examines whether veteran–novice mentorship between tutors, as part of continuous in-service professional development, would have a positive effect on either party’s transferable skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, and professionalism). Quantitative findings from pre- and postsurveys about the veteran–novice mentorship suggest that tutors have significant gains in some transferable skills, such as oral/written communication skills, teamwork/collaboration skills, digital technology skills, and career management skills, after attending the continuous in-service professional development. Quantitative findings from the pre- and postsurveys further indicate that novice tutors improve more, compared to veteran tutors, in their self-perceived oral/written communication skill levels. Qualitative findings from postmentorship interviews explain findings suggested by quantitative analysis, with contextual factors. This research study has bifold significance: “a theoretical perspective” on writing center work and research-supported professional development strategies. The findings of this study provide more food for thought on the subjects of how to design veteran–novice mentorships, how to target some transferable skills for professional development in the future, and how to exemplify the transferable skills in the survey to make those abstract constructs more concrete.

Writing centers seek to expand their services beyond tutoring and develop evidence-based practices. Continuing and expanding the existing practices, the authors have adopted graduate writing groups (GWGs) to support graduate writers, especially those working on independent writing projects like a dissertation or article for publication. This article provides an effective model on how to develop and assess virtual graduate writing groups (VGWGs). This replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research applied a mixed-methods design with pre- and postsurveys over the three semesters of running the VGWG. It found that the VGWG offered a full range of writing support that met graduate writers’ needs for time-based, skill-based, draft-based, and emotion-based support. Specifically, the VGWG significantly improved students’ approaches to writing in five key areas—goal setting, focusing on dissertation writing, generating plans for writing sessions, writing productivity, and writing progress. Therefore, this study contributes robust empirical validation of this model, suggesting that VGWG is an effective method to sup-port graduate writers and expand writing center services. Also, the authors provide a useful model on how writing centers can effectively assess through pre- and postsurveys in a straightforward manner, an assessment model that has both internal and external benefits.

Writing center professionals’ (WCPs) efforts to integrate transfer of learning theory into writing tutor education have exceeded empirical research on the effects of such curricula. Building on research in this area (Cardinal, 2018; Hill, 2016), we designed and implemented a semester-long, transfer-focused training curriculum for experienced undergraduate writing tutors that sought to build on tutors’ prior knowledge of writing center pedagogy. We tracked these tutors’ understanding of, attitudes toward, and uses of transfer and transfer talk in writing center sessions over the course of a semester. Through analysis of training meeting transcripts and a post-training survey, we found that tutors developed a basic understanding of transfer and demonstrated positive attitudes toward transfer and transfer talk; however, they responded negatively to examples of explicit transfer talk in the curriculum and proposed modifications constrained by the social context of tutoring (Carillo, 2020). We characterize these modifications as instances of tutors contextualizing transfer talk in light of their prior knowledge of writing center pedagogy. We encourage WCPs who are designing or researching transfer-focused tutor education to conduct additional empirical research and to prioritize tutors’ perceptions and experiences in order to develop more dynamic conceptions of transfer in writing center studies (Carillo, 2020).

This article makes an argument for the value of both replicable research and replication research in writing center studies. In their discussion of replicability, the authors argue that writing about empirical research so that this research can be replicated will improve the quality of communication in writing center studies whether or not replication studies are subsequently undertaken. The authors further provide for researchers specific guidance on how to create replicable studies, focusing on best practices for describing data sets and sampling, sharing surveys and interview protocols, detailing coding efforts, establishing infrastructure to share data sets, and writing about statistics. Further, the authors explain how replication studies would add new kinds of knowledge to writing center studies. The authors specify that the kinds of replication studies they wish to see should be distinguished from both the positivistic approach to replication taken in other, more quantitative fields and from a looser, iterative approach to building on previous research that has been advocated for within writing studies.

Most tutors are trained in a core writing centers belief: Student writers who talk about their writing are student writers who will achieve better learning outcomes. Our comparative study—one of few in writing center research—examined the points in conferences in which student writers talked the most. We examined the very long turns (VLTs) of eight native English speaking (NES) student writers and eight non-native English speaking (NNES) student writers across 16 writing center conferences. We found that NESs contributed more VLTs than NNESs and that more NES conferences contained VLTs. We also found that stating goals for the conference occurred in half of the NES conferences, specifically, in the opening stage, while no NNES conferences had stated opening goals. In the three NNES conferences that contained VLTs, two contained a statement of a sentence-level goal, a description of potential content for the paper, and a period of time spent reading aloud from the paper. Of the VLTs preceded by questions, pumping questions (questions that prod student responses) occurred most frequently. We discuss the role that student-writer motivation and familiarity with the typical conference script played in the results and some implications of this comparative study for tutor training.

As online writing tutorials become increasingly widespread, writing center scholars continue to debate the pedagogical differences between face-to-face and online tutoring However, empirical research has lagged behind technological advancement, with only one study (Wolfe & Griffin, 2012) comparing face-to-face and media-rich online writing center tutorials. This article builds on such scholarship by sharing results from a comparative study of face-to-face and synchronous audio-video online tutorials that collected data from writing tutorials, writers' postsession surveys, and interviews with writers. Using primarily linguistic analysis of the hundreds of interactions in each of the 24 transcribed writing tutorials, we determined that audio-video online and face-to-face sessions share similarities in tutoring strategies, discourse phases, tutor-writer interaction, and student satisfaction. However, significant differences were found

Students' misunderstanding of faculty expectations for paraphrase has been empirically demonstrated, and many writing centers conduct workshops to help students adopt better strategies for work with sources. However, little empirical research supports the effectiveness of such efforts. For this study, researchers examined students' attempts to paraphrase before and after a 45-minute workshop presented by an undergraduate peer tutor in several sections of an introductory political science course. Our findings demonstrate that the workshop did help students improve both their understanding of what is expected of them and their attempts to paraphrase. The average score for language increased from 3.11 in the pretest to 3.86 on a 5-point scale in the posttest (n=107, p.001). However, as many students improved at avoiding patchwriting, the quality of their representation of an idea from a source appeared to decline; ideas scores dropped after the workshop from 3.36 to 3.03 (n=107, p.01). The drop

This article examines writing center administrators (WCAs) in relationship to conditions that influence their institutional status and scholarly identity. Drawing upon survey and interview data, we elaborate on four themes that shape WCAs' experiences: 1. education and training; 2. position and institutional oversight; 3. financial resources; and 4. sponsorship. While these factors do not impact all WCAs in the same ways, we believe they influence WCAs' empirical research production and their relationships with department-based colleagues in interesting albeit context-dependent ways when viewed across the experiences of the current study's participants and those queried in earlier studies. After examining the implications of these factors -factors that suggest a separate and unequal WCA experience -we first propose the need for more comprehensive study of current professionals in our field to determine the degree to which the themes that emerged from our sample resonate

Much of the scholarship on writing centers narrates the stories of writers and their texts as told by tutors, administrators, and researchers. In an effort to bring writers' voices to the forefront, this empirical study examines the types of questions and concerns writers have about their writing as submitted through the Purdue Writing Lab's OWL Mail, an online, asynchronous question-and-answer email platform. Through the employment of what Richard H. Haswell ( The implications of these results and the ways they may inform tutor preparation in response to writers' email inquiries are discussed. Suggestions for future research are also provided.

Over a three year period beginning in 2011, our writing center conducted IRB -approved empirical research on the role of tutor-posed and writer-posed questions in writing center dialogues. Using a corpus comprising three linguistically accurate transcripts and 25 glossed transcripts, we1 painstakingly identified and coded writers' and tutors' questions using a question taxonomy based on Arthur C. Graesser & Natalie K. We also identified and coded the cognitive moves revealed in both writers' and tutors' resultant answers using an answer taxonomy, the revised Bloom's taxonomy proposed by Iowa State's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (Heer, 2012). 2 While we intend future articles to discuss our findings, especially those significantly informing our internal practice and staff development, our research plays a different role in this article. In a typical research write-up, the data reveals the plot; that is, researchers start with a question that leads them to collect data. Researchers then handle the data, analyze it, and interpret it to answer their research questions. But for the purposes of this article, which is a metacognitive reflection on our research process, Data plays a different role. In a way, this is the story of how Data handled us.

This essay argues for a broad theoretical perspective in writing center work that simultaneously contextualizes tutoring practices and complements research agendas. Writing center scholarship shows considerable resistance to both empirical research agendas and theoretical perspectives. Confronting this, the author chooses to examine the issue of directive/nondirective tutoring to evaluate theory as a framework.