Kaplan University Academic Support Center Facutty Blog, entries about writing, writing center pedagogy, tutoring, etc. Has a search box to find various topics.
Name of center: Community Writing Center Institutional affiliation: Salt Lake Community College Location: Salt Lake City, Utah Web address: http://www.slcc.edu/wc/community/ Director: Tiffany Rousculp Year opened: 2001 History: The basic idea for the Community Writing Center emerged during a tennis match.
From Neal Lerner's July 2011 message to WCenter:
Folks, the latest issue (July 2011) of the Journal of Writing Research includes a very impressive study by James Williams and Seiji Takaku of the relationship between college students' self-efficacy, help-seeking behaviors, writing center visits, and writing performance. Here's a link to a pdf of the study:
http://www.jowr.org/articles/vol3_1/JoWR_2011_vol3_nr1_Williams_Takaku.pdf
Here's a snippet to take to your dean:
"The analysis showed that those students who frequently obtained writing center tutoring received higher grades in composition than those who did not, regardless of their ESL or native-English-speaker status. The frequency of writing center tutoring seemed to be especially valuable for the ESL students, who outperform their domestic cohorts, receiving significantly higher grades in composition."
Launched in March 2013, the National Census of Writing seeks to provide a data-based landscape of writing instruction at two- and four-year public and not-for-profit institutions of higher education in the United States. Despite numerous calls for empirical data to ground the design and administration of writing programs and writing centers, this is the first comprehensive study of its kind and covers the following sections:
* Sites of writing
* First-year writing/English composition
* Identifying and supporting diversely-prepared students
* Writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing beyond the first year
* The undergraduate and graduate writing major and minor
* Writing centers
* Administrative structures
* Demographics of respondents
"Launched in March 2013, the National Census of Writing seeks to provide a data-based landscape of writing instruction at two- and four-year public and not-for-profit institutions of higher education in the United States. Despite numerous calls for empirical data to ground the design and administration of writing programs and writing centers, this is the first comprehensive study of its kind and covers the following sections:
Sites of writing
First-year writing/English composition
Identifying and supporting diversely-prepared students
Writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing beyond the first year
The undergraduate and graduate writing major and minor
Writing centers
Administrative structures
Demographics of respondents
With data from 900 institutions, the National Census of Writing will help educators and administrators across the country to better understand the variety of ways in which writing instruction is delivered in the twenty-first century.
The research team has made the processed data available through this open-access database, which allows individuals to gather national data on pressing local questions. The database is searchable by type of institution, institutional size, geographical location, and, when we have consent, by the name of the institution."
Chloe Diepenbrock's :Introducing Susie: How to create a virtual Writing Center tutor," discusses virtual tutoring. Susie is the virtual tutor on the website for the Writing Center at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
■ "We Also Ofer Online Services at Interpellation.edu":
Althusserian Hails and Online Writing Centers
Alan Benson
■ Situated Design for Multiliteracy Centers: A Rhetorical
Approach to Visual Design
Sohui Lee
■ Back to the Center: University of North Carolina
Greensboro's Digital ACT Studio
Lindsay Sabatino
■ Yes...And With Me: Mutuality and Improvisation as
Methods for Consultant Development
Kerri Bright Flinchbaugh
■ Training Speech Center Consultants: Moving Forward
with a Backward Glance
Linda Hobgood
■ Promoting Independence: Conducting Efcient
Sessions with Learning-Disabled Students
Ory Alexander Owen
From Praxis: "Writing centers are feeling the effects of budget reductions across higher education nationwide. Like other student services that don't offer credits or produce revenue, writing centers are particularly vulnerable to budget cuts. Community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities across the country are asking writing centers to make hard choices- choices that will affect consultant hiring, pay, and benefits as well as hours of operation, services, technological resources, and administration."
Position statements on graduate student writing center administration, two-year college writing centers, disabilities, diversity, and racism/anti-immigration/linguistic intolerance.
Discusses research findings that writing center users procrastinate less on their writing, and that writing centers can be particularly helpful for student who have a high procrastination tendency.
Suggests that writing centers should look to Long's Reactive Behavior Patters in order to better understand writer and writing center consultant behavior.