From scholars working in a variety of institutional and geographic contexts and with a wide range of student populations, Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs offers perspectives on how writing programs can support or hinder students’ transitions to college. The contributors present individual and program case studies, student surveys, a wealth of institutional retention data, and critical policy analysis. Rates of student retention in higher education are a widely acknowledged problem: although approximately 66 percent of high school graduates begin college, of those who attend public four-year institutions, only about 80 percent return the following year, with 58 percent graduating within six years. At public two-year institutions, only 60 percent of students return, and fewer than a third graduate within three years. Less commonly known is the crucial effect of writing courses on these statistics. First-year writing is a course that virtually all students have to take; thus, writing programs are well-positioned to contribute to larger institutional conversations regarding retention and persistence and should offer themselves as much-needed sites for advocacy, research, and curricular innovation. Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs is a timely resource for writing program administrators as well as for new writing teachers, advisors, administrators, and state boards of education. Contributors: Matthew Bridgewater, ​Cristine Busser, Beth Buyserie, Polina Chemishanova, ​Michael Day, ​Bruce Feinstein, ​Patricia Freitag Ericsson, ​Nathan Garrett, ​Joanne Baird Giordano, ​Tawanda Gipson, ​Sarah E. Harris, Mark Hartlaub, ​Holly Hassel, ​Jennifer Heinert, ​Ashley J. Holmes, ​Rita Malenczyk, ​Christopher P. Parker, ​Cassandra Phillips, ​Anna Plemons, ​Pegeen Reichert Powell, ​Marc Scott, Robin Snead, ​Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, ​Sara Webb-Sunderhaus, ​Susan Wolff Murphy

Retention and Resistance combines personal student narratives with a critical analysis of the current approach to retention in colleges and universities, and explores how retention can inform a revision of goals for first-year writing teachers. Retention is a vital issue for institutions, but as these students’ stories show, leaving college is often the result of complex and idiosyncratic individual situations that make institutional efforts difficult and ultimately ineffective. An adjustment of institutional and pedagogical objectives is needed to refocus on educating as many students as possible, including those who might leave before graduation. Much of the pedagogy, curricula, and methodologies of composition studies assume students are preparing for further academic study. Retention and Resistance argues for a new kairotic pedagogy that moves toward an emphasis on the present classroom experience and takes students’ varied experiences into account. Infusing the discourse of retention with three individual student voices, Powell explores the obligation of faculty to participate in designing an institution that educates all students, no matter where they are in their educational journey or how far that journey will go.

College student retention continues to be a top priority among colleges, universities, educators, federal and state legislatures, parents and students. While access to higher education is virtually universally available, many students who start in a higher education program do not complete the program or achieve their academic and personal goals. In spite of the programs and services colleges and universities have devoted to this issue, student retention and graduation rates have not improved considerably over time. College Student Retention: Formula for Student Success, Third Edition offers a solution to this vexing problem. It provides background information about college student retention issues and offers the educational community pertinent information to help all types of students succeed. The book lays out the financial implications and trends of retention. Current theories of retention, retention of online students, and retention in community colleges are also thoroughly discussed. Completely new to this edition are chapters that examine retention of minority and international students. Additionally, a formula for student success is provided which if colleges and universities implement student academic and personal goals may be attained.

College writing center practices differ greatly from the types of conventional writing instruction students and faculty are used to in classrooms. While conventional college lectures typically lead to a summative assessment in the form of grades based on students' performance on high-stakes assignments, writing centers are seen as tutoring centers where students can receive more personalized attention in the form of formative assessment practices and a process oriented approach to instruction prior to receiving summative evaluations from lecturers. This study measured whether or not there was a relationship between writing center visits and student outcomes as they related to retention rates as measured by the number of students who remained active or completed throughout the study, student persistence rates as measured by credits earned, and student success as measured by cumulative GPAs. This study contributes greatly to existing literature because of the unique "at-risk" student population sampled and the study's unique research design, a multiple hierarchical regression.The study's participants consisted of 180 students who utilized writing center services at a small open-enrollment college on an urban commuter campus in the northeast, hereby referred to as UCC, a pseudonym. Data were collected using a proprietary database that captured student data via their student ID cards, which students used to access the writing center and other academic resource centers on campus. A hierarchical multiple regression research design was chosen because the model measured the relationships of groups of tiered or nested predictor variables that could have impacted student success both on and off campus, such as a student's participation in other academic support programs or the type of major they chose, or the amount of credits they had earned. This method facilitated the examination of variables separate from the effects of other plausible factors. This research study's findings indicated that there was a significant relationship between student outcomes, writing center visits when grouped by class (freshman, sophomore0́Œ), and other tiered or nested variables. However, the number of times students visited the writing center did not have a significant effect when all students were considered.

Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing addresses a scholarly audience in writing studies, specifically scholars and teachers of writing, writing program administrators, and writing center scholars and administrators. Chapters focus on the place of cognition in threshold concepts, teaching for transfer, rhetorical theory, trauma theory, genre, writing centers, community writing, and applications of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. The 1980s witnessed a growing interest in writing studies on cognitive approaches to studying and teaching college-level writing. While some would argue this interest was simply of a moment, we argue that cognitive theories still have great influence in writing studies and have substantial potential to continue reinvigorating what we know about writing and writers. By grounding this collection in ongoing interest in writing-related transfer, the role of metacognition in supporting successful transfer, and the habits of mind within the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing highlights the robust but also problematic potential cognitive theories of writing hold for how we research writing, how we teach and tutor writers, and how we work with community writers. Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing includes a foreword by Susan Miller-Cochran and an afterword by Asao Inoue. Additional contributors include Melvin E. Beavers, Subrina Bogan, Harold Brown, Christine Cucciarre, Barbara J. D’Angelo, Gita DasBender, Tonya Eick, Gregg Fields, Morgan Gross, Jessica Harnisch, David Hyman, Caleb James, Peter H. Khost, William J. Macauley, Jr., Heather MacDonald, Barry M. Maid, Courtney Patrick-Weber, Patricia Portanova, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, J. Michael Rifenburg, Duane Roen, Airlie Rose, Wendy Ryden, Thomas Skeen, Michelle Stuckey, Sean Tingle, James Toweill, Martha A. Townsend, Kelsie Walker, and Bronwyn T. Williams.

Privacy Matters examines how communications and writing educators, administrators, technological resource coordinators, and scholars can address the ways surveillance and privacy affect student and faculty composing, configure identity formation, and subvert the surveillance state. This collection offers practical analyses of surveillance and privacy as they occur within classrooms and communities. Organized by themes—surveillance and classrooms, surveillance and bodies, surveillance and culture—Privacy Matters provides writing, rhetoric, and communication scholars and teachers with specific approaches, methods, inquiries, and examinations into the impact tracking and monitoring has upon people’s habits, bodies, and lived experiences. While each chapter contributes a new perspective in the discipline and beyond, Privacy Matters affirms that these analyses remain inconclusive. This collection is a call for scholars, researchers, activists, and educators within rhetoric and composition to continue the scholarly conversation because privacy matters to all of us. Contributors: Christina Cedillo, Jenae Cohn, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Dustin Edwards, Norah Fahim, Ann Hill Duin, Gavin P. Johnson, John Peterson, Santos Ramos, Colleen A. Reilly, Jennifer Roth Miller, Jason Tham, Stephanie Vie

In Telling Stories, more than a dozen longitudinal writing researchers look beyond conventional project findings to story their work and, in doing so, offer otherwise unavailable glimpses into the logics and logistics of long-range studies of writing. The result is a volume that centers interrelations among people, places, and politics across two decades of praxis and an array of educational sites: two-year colleges, a senior military college, an adult literacy center, a small liberal arts college, and both public and private four-year universities. Contributors share direct knowledge of longitudinal writing research, citing project data (e.g., interview transcripts, research notes, and journals), descriptions drawn from memory, and extended personal reflections. The resulting stories, tempered by the research and scholarship of others, convey a sense of longitudinal research as a lived activity as well as a prominent and consequential approach to inquiry. Yet Telling Stories is not a how-to guide, nor is it written for longitudinal researchers alone. Instead, this volume addresses issues about writing research that are germane to all who conduct or count on it. Such topics include building and sustaining good interpersonal research relations, ethically negotiating the institutional power dynamics that undergird writing research, effectively using knowledge from longitudinal studies to advocate for writers and writing educators, and improving both conceptual and concrete resources for long-range research in writing studies.