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This article focused on how student-teacher relationships play a part in the students' development. They particularly focused on what part alienation played in students' academic achievement and in their level of disciplinary problems. It also focused on how these relationships varied between different school settings and among varying racial-ethnic groups.

This is a webpage from UCLA's Office of Instructional Development. It talks about the different things an instructor can do to encourage class discussion and make students feel comfortable enough in their class environment to share their ideas. The webpage mentions tips like really getting to know the students, calling on them by name and having them refer to each other by name, breaking students up into groups of 3-4 people, and how to handle disagreeing with your students when they do share. Other than how to stimulate discussion, the webpage also covers asking effective questions and the cycle of feedback.

Nature writing This particular article deals with a post-composition era that still resides in the university. Writing is depicted as a means of a disconnection between different experiences that students often times find themselves bewildered. This goes along with the argument against writing from the stimulation of reading: writing, for example, a response to a piece of reading in an anthology might be interesting, but it does not provide the original experience for the writer. By the time something is put into words, it makes a specific connection, or a specific rhetorical stance towards that thing. Reading, then, becomes a re-interpretation of a text, not the original experience wherewith the text is from. What this paper argues, then, is to take students through the original experience of actually confronting the scene of nature itself: what is there, what is constituted, and what can be written. Traditional texts in nature writing include the following: Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Joseph Krutch's The Desert Year. The course would include times dedicated to the reading of what is emphasised on style of writing, technique of writing and different elements of style. By then, not only would the students learn the value made by the originality of experience, they also learn the value that writers put into writing. It is not an exaggerating thing to say that such is the writing experienced by a writer. Peer critique is one of the crucial aspects of the course where students will give feedbacks on "perception, emotion, evaluation that includes both efferent and aesthetic considerations". At the end of the course, the value(s) in perception will be a lifelong skill, which in time develops into a tradition.

"Understanding the Gap Between High School and College Writing" compares the different levels of writing between high school student and college students. The article found that the two groups of teachers, high school and college, have extremely different views of the students' level of writing. While 36 percent of the high school teachers believed their students were well prepared, only 6 percent of college faculty thought the students were well prepared. The article examines how first year writing courses can be organized to help the incoming students more by surveying the students' writing history and getting a detailed account of the common or not common assignments from their senior year of high school. Often, the assignments and skills expected in college were not yet developed in high school students, including criticizing a written argument, providing peer feedback, and turning in drafts. The article concludes with ways in which first year writing classes may be improved, as well as examples of the different types of needs that have to be met.

This article addresses the importance of the student perspective in shaping and changing the educational structure of the classroom. Though this article does no explicitly address writing,it can be assumed writing is a manner in which we gain insight into the student perspective. The article examines various pedagogical perspectives in which authorization of the students perspective could best develop. The author address the traditional student-teacher relationship as that of a power relationship.However, in these power relationships there is no place for listening, because to truly listen warrant a response to what is being heard. All to often, the classroom is not a forum for open dialogue, therefore there is really very little listening going on. The student can become lost in this environment without a voice, diminish any authority that would make him/her an better writer.

The goal of the article was to broaden the current understanding of social contexts in education. It focused on student-teacher relationship from the perspectives of attachment, motivation, and sociocultural effects.

The title of the article, Understanding the College First-year Experience, basically explains the focus of the article. Kirk Kidwell summarizes the typical first year development of a freshman student as a time of purgatory. Successful students are able to go through four phases; dualism, multiplicity, relativism, and commitment to relativism. Through the phases, students lean to change from a passive style of learning to an active style of learning, as well as learn the "game: of college academia. In the game of college writing, Kidwell believes if students pass through the "academic hazing" or purgatory of the first year, they will learn the following two lessons. First, "College is not high school; one cannot just coast through" (Kidwell 253). Second, "The successful college student takes responsibility for his or her education" (Kidwell 254). These lessons are a good idea, but I feel they are too simple. Of course college is not high school. Stating such an obvious observation seems condescending towards freshmen students, regardless if they do or do not realize the fact. Also, the article summarizes the first year well, but it leaves out the more intricate parts of changing the issues freshmen students face. The missing issues include; how can teachers make the freshmen year less of a purgatory, is it possible to prepare high school students better through a change of curriculum, how do we help students to stay in college instead of dropping out, and how can we create awareness of college "is not high school"? These are crucial points that are completely missing from the article, thus the article is better for a basic understanding of what freshmen endure their first year of college.

The author of this article uses the critical perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of language and Lev Vygotsky's theory of language learning to examine the polyphonic texture of writing workshops, the dialogic classroom, the teacher's role as writer and authority figure, and the student's search for voice and role. So, she decides to participate in and observe (two students in particular) an introductory composition class in order to explain the polyphonic texture of workshops. In the end, she concludes stating that "we must resist reductive descriptions of our students' development as writers. (…) each writing workshop will compose a different "polyphony" of disparate elements which each student will appropriate and reshape in different configurations" (171). Unfortunately, you will have to log in as a member to view this article. It can also be found in Chico State's e-library.

When reading student work, I often come across misspellings like "u", "cuz" or the annoying lower case i. It's crossed my mind a few times that these mistakes are because of an increasingly technology dependent world. This article discusses the links between the digital age of writing and the academic world of writing. Can one exist with the other? The author suggests that students use things like texting as another form of writing they must learn how to do, just like creative writing or science writing.

A collaborative article of Patricia McCarthy, Scott Meier and Regina Rinderer, this article explores the idea of self-efficacy, or rather a student's perception of their own self-efficacy, in relation to writing competency at the college level.They explain that students who estimate their writing abilities and effectiveness to be quite high perform accordingly, and that this holds also for students who estimate their abilities to be quite low (the Pygmalion Effect in action). While this comes as a surprise to few, these authors further explain that of a few key factors, namely perceived self-efficacy, anxiety, locus of control, and cognitive processing methods, while all affect the quality of writing produced by students, self-efficacy proved to be the strongest predictor of student performance regardless of the other conditions in their studies. Students who become used to a process of accurate and frequent self-evaluation, both of the final product AND of their abilities separate from the product, may develop a more accurate and more proactive view of their writing competence and their later work may reflect this.