Keeping Them in the Seats: Retention and Basic Writing

Craig Jacobsen

Mesa Community College

Retaining them long enough to complete that sequence, however, means first keeping them through however many semesters of basic writing their placement scores and institutional policies require, and basic writing classes frequently have an exponentially higher attrition rate than first year composition courses. Some retention difficulties arise from risk factors that many students (though certainly not all) bring with them:

1. Basic writers often lack strong academic skills.
   Many basic writers’ problems stem from weak academic strategies. Students’ inability to read assignments closely and understand what is required of them, failure to meet deadlines and poor work time allocation often sabotage their efforts.

2. Basic writers often lack confidence in their writing abilities.
   Small wonder. Many basic writing students have experience in “remedial” courses, or have a history of low grades in writing courses. Even students who don’t have such discouraging histories have their confidence shaken by placement processes that label them “under-prepared.”

3. Basic writers often think that good writing means demonstrating mastery of the rules that govern form, grammar, and spelling.
   Because much primary and secondary writing instruction focuses on getting students to memorize the mechanics of English, and provides a formulaic notion of structure, we shouldn’t be surprised when students haven’t thought of writing as a dynamic process that changes to fit the exigencies of a situation.

4. Basic writers often mystify the writing process.
   Their experience frequently tells basic writers that “some people were born to write, and some people weren’t.” Their logic, while understandable (Premise 1: I have been in English classes throughout my school career and still don’t “get it.” Premise 2: Other people in those same classes “get it.” Conclusion: They were born with an innate talent that I lack and, since I haven’t learned it yet, probably can’t learn.), is flawed. Just because the kind of instruction that they have so far received hasn’t helped them, doesn’t mean a different approach would not.

5. Basic writers are often nontraditional students.
   Perceived lack of academic success frequently leads students to delay college, which can intensify writing anxiety (“It’s been a long time since I wrote anything.”). Such students’ academic experience is often complicated by increased outside pressures from jobs and family, which, for obvious reasons, take priority over coursework.

These factors and others (ESL issues, economic concerns, etc.) combine to sensitize basic writing students to forces that will remove them from class. A non-traditional student with already poor academic skills might find it particularly difficult to balance family time with writing time. Add to that the frustration bred by hopelessness (“I’ll never get it.”) and you’ve got a recipe for the vanishing student.

Students enter our basic writing courses with a whole set of baggage that we might not be able to easily identify, and thus might not be able to address before it is too late and students disappear. Because we can’t know the individual factors that will cause students to withdraw from our classes (or pass our classes and then withdraw from the next one in the sequence, which simply masks the problem), we need to consider seriously how our individual classes, our writing programs, our institutions and our discipline contribute to or detract from retention efforts.

For example, offering basic writing students the grammar-based and rule-oriented writing instruction that many institutions and widely adopted textbooks present may simply be feeding them more of what has already failed them. Seeing their worst fears confirmed, that even in college writing is about where the commas go or whether the thesis statement is the last sentence of your introductory paragraph, students revert to previous unsuccessful behaviors.

We often ask each other and ourselves how we can teach our students to write better. We need to be asking be asking a more complex question: How can we teach our students to write better in a way that keeps them in their seats long enough to learn it?

Retention needs to be addressed at many levels. We need to ask ourselves relevant questions:

• What can we do in our classrooms to make students want to keep attending?
• How can we present material in novel and engaging ways that demonstrate to our students the importance and relevance of the class?
• How do the assumptions under which we operate a class contribute to attrition?
• How can we help students develop academic strategies that will help them succeed?

• What message does the relative position of basic writing send to students?
• Who teaches basic writing and what is their status?
• How do we assess basic writing effectiveness?
• What do we do to establish continuity between basic writing and first year composition?

• How are students placed in basic writing classes?
• How are basic writing classes described to students?
• How can we use retention rates to make a case for greater attention (and perhaps resources) to basic writing?
• What role does student advising play in retention?

• How can we influence textbook production to develop more engaging texts?
• How can we engage more basic writing instructors in disciplinary conversation?
• How do we make use of existing theoretical and empirical information to influence political and institutional perceptions of basic writing?
• What can we do to ensure basic writing’s place in higher education?

Your thoughts?

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