Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing: Identity, Process, and Transfer at a Public University

Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing presents the results of a large-scale longitudinal study of college writers that explores the impact of a required first-year writing course with a comparative approach not previously available. Over five years Laura Wilder conducted 143 interviews with, and collected 774 pages of writing from, 58 students, half of whom had taken a new first-year writing course and half who had not. Wilder found that while in many ways the experiences of both groups ...