This Instructional Note provides information on having students create research posters to support oral presentations in their first-year writing classes. Creating digital posters connects to multimodal assignments and provides transferable skills.

This study examines the effects of a curriculum based on self-regulated strategy instruction in an accelerated developmental education (DE) English course in a community college. Faculty at the college had established a four-week two-credit compressed course that enabled students to enroll in an eleven-week first-year composition (FYC) course in the same semester reducing remediation from fifteen weeks to just four weeks. The course focused on writing argumentative essays using sources. The study used a quasi-experimental design with five instructors and sixty-six students to compare the experimental curriculum to a business-as-usual control condition. In the experimental curriculum students learned strategies for writing using sources including strategies for critical reading and for planning and revising. In addition to writing and reading strategies students also learned metacognitive self-regulation strategies such as goal setting task management and reflection. The study found a large positive effect (ES = .96) of the treatment on quality of an argument essay written using sources. However no significant effects were found on a summary outline self-efficacy or completion of the subsequent FYC course. The study demonstrates the value of strategy instruction in DE English courses; it is the first experimental study of strategy instruction in an accelerated DE course. Further research is needed to evaluate the effects of strategy instruction in corequisite courses and in FYC.

While conducting a writing conference with her niece for a university assignment Monique Warena discovered the most important tool for empowering young Indigenous writers is to listen.