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Full-Text Articles in Education
Mediated-Efficacy: Hope For “Helpless” Writers, Eileen K. Camfield
Mediated-Efficacy: Hope For “Helpless” Writers, Eileen K. Camfield
University Writing Programs Staff Articles and Papers
Building on previous studies of college students' writing self-efficacy beliefs, this article presents the empirical foundation for a reconceptualized understanding of this identity process. The study assessed 131 college freshmen enrolled in a developmental writing course who were evaluated holistically using grounded theory methodology. The study identified (a) major theoretical categories revealing the nature of students' initial pessimism about themselves as writers and sense of learned helplessness and (b) a subsequent shift toward optimism and self-efficacy triggered by a particular learning relationship formed with their instructors, the core of the posited mediated-efficacy theory. Implications for college-level developmental writing pedagogy are …
Fast And Fruitful: Effective Writing Assessment For Determining The Success Of New Initiatives, Eileen K. Camfield
Fast And Fruitful: Effective Writing Assessment For Determining The Success Of New Initiatives, Eileen K. Camfield
University Writing Programs Staff Articles and Papers
Many writing program administrators experience a familiar conundrum: heed the cries for fast assessment results or engage in the lengthy and complicated process that meaningful review of student learning seems to entail? Such was my plight in the 2013–2014 academic year when my university deployed a new strategy for supporting incoming developmental writers. Beginning that fall, students whose writing-SAT (SAT-W) scores were between 450 and 500 were enrolled in a course known as Seminar Plus Studio (SPS), an interdisciplinary class that included a weekly supplemental 100-minute studio aimed at delivering targeted writing instruction, practice, and feedback. Instructors for these sections …