Trends in American research on college composition, 1960-2005

Abstract

Any overview of the topic of American Research on College Composition for the forty-five year period 1960-2005 is bound to be at a high level of generality and not comprehensive. What follows is a quick guide to some of the main themes that animated this era of composition research, with particular emphasis on the gap between college professors in newly-formed and rapidly growing composition programs who focused upon college-level writers, and more traditional researchers based in colleges of education who focused upon primary and secondary school students. As my survey will show, these two groups of researchers once talked to each other, but over forty-five years gradually drew apart, much to their mutual loss. The college professors of composition studies have tended to conduct qualitative research, while scholars in colleges of education have tended to conduct quantitative research. In one sense, then, my survey is of a loss of coherence, a parting of the ways in which two rich traditions of research flourished but inevitably grew apart.