Why Writing Works: Disciplinary Approaches to Composing Texts is an open-access, online textbook resource for college writing. It is written for an audience of second-year college students with a focus on writing in the disciplines.

A checklist in student language used by elementary students to self-assess their wikis.

This SoftChalk lesson was designed for 7th graders to teach them how to use (and when not to use) Wikipedia while researching.

This resource is the first lesson for the first quarter under Module 1 in Researh I for Science, Technology and Engineering (STEP Program and Special Science Class students. This includes activities that will assist the students in understanding concepts related to curiosity. 

FreeReading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. FreeReading contains Writing Activities, a page of activities to address important writing skills and strategies.

Volumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspectives on a wide-range of topics about writing. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larger conversation about the craft of writing. Consequently, each essay functions as a standalone text that can easily complement other selected readings in writing or writing-intensive courses across the disciplines at any level.

Third revision, August 2017.

Welcome to Writing Unleashed, designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs, written as an extremely brief guide for students, jam-packed with teachers’ voices, students’ voices, and engineered for fun.

This textbook was created by Dana Anderson, Ronda Marman, and Sybil Priebe - all first-year college composition instructors at the North Dakota State College of Science in Wahpeton, ND.

Download here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JoX94RjwS-WoPnGCyIZ9ZTQeX74iG9hS

Writing for Inquiry and Research guides students through the composition process of writing a research paper. The book divides this process into four chapters that each focus on a genre connected to research writing: the annotated bibliography, proposal, literature review, and research essay. Each chapter provides significant guidance with reading, writing, and research strategies, along with significant examples and links to external resources. This book serves to help students and instructors with a writing-project-based approach, transforming the research process into an accessible series of smaller, more attainable steps for a semester-long course in research writing. Additional resources throughout the book, as well as in three appendices, allow for students and instructors to explore the many facets of the writing process together.

Students of instructional design now have their own guide for writing a literature review in their graduate programs. Focused on the unique requirements of IDT research, this user-friendly text provides step-by-step instructions for planning, researching, and writing a quality literature review. Based on adult learning principles, this book delivers strategies that students will take with them into their careers as instructional designers. This is the actual text that the author uses in his graduate-level, IDT research courses, and now his strategies are available for other educators to adapt and use for their students. 

This course packet seeks to develop the upper level engineering student’s sense of audience and purpose in a research-based context with workplace constraints. It requires the student to choose a technical topic of interest and research it to solve for a specific problem or to meet a typical industry need by way of several assignments: Unsolicited Research Proposal, Progress Report, Visual Aids, and Oral Presentation, all of which lead to the Formal Report. This approach readies students to write informatively and persuasively in the engineering workplace, providing excellent examples of each assignment contributed by former students whose Formal Reports have won first place in the annual Technical Writing Competition. Because users can rely on demonstrably excellent student examples to understand the concepts behind assignments that build on one another rather than on disparate textbook examples, they tend to write better and to be more confident producing documents and giving presentations. In short, they recognize they are among their own in a class that challenges many engineering students. Moreover, since all the Formal Reports have won awards, convincing students they are using good models with which to create their own documents is relatively easy. Finally, mining excellent student documents makes certain skill-sets clearer, according to former students. For instance, students can follow along as the writer does the following: identifies and proves a problem or need exists; creates the research objectives that lead to the method with which they will address the issue; and develops persuasive strategies for convincing both executive and engineering readers. Similarly, these student papers demonstrate how to discern among results, conclusions, and recommendations and show correct use of sources and visuals.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antibiotic use can increase the abundance of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) within microbial communities. This occurs in many settings, including in agricultural fields and within the digestive tract of livestock. These two settings interact when manure is used as fertilizer, carrying ARGs from the livestock gut to soil. Earthworms — and their gut microbiomes — play key roles in soil nutrient cycling and are often used as bioindicators in environmental risk assessment. However, the impact of common agricultural antimicrobials or the addition of manure on ARGs in the gut microbiome of earthworms is rarely examined. A recent study found that exposure to the fungicide carbendazim altered their gut microbial community and increased the abundance of ARGs. Specifically, earthworms dwelling in the manure-amended soil had more abundant ARGs in their gut microbiome and exposure to carbendazim enhanced this effect..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Heart attacks, or myocardial infarctions, are a major cause of death globally and can leave survivors with severe, lingering symptoms. Exercise is a key rehabilitation tool, but exactly how it helps patients recover is not yet known. The microbes in our gut directly impact our health in other ways, but could they play a role in exercise-related recovery after heart attacks? To test this possibility, a team of researchers used a mouse model of myocardial infarction (MI). First, they demonstrated that exercise training reduced cardiac dysfunction after MI and that exercise after MI altered the gut microbial richness and community structure. Depleting the microbiota prior to MI blocked the protective effects of exercise, suggesting that the benefits were dependent upon the microbiota. Further, transplanting the gut microbiota from exercised post-MI mice conferred cardiac benefits to recipient mice..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Advancements in next-generation sequencing have opened the door to detailed analyses of the human microbiome. This technique has many applications, and pancreatic cancer research is one of them. Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease with an estimated 5-year survival rate of only 11%. Most cases, over 80%, are not found until the cancer is too advanced to successfully treat, but pancreatic cancer patients show shifts in their oral microbiome, which could be detected years earlier than current methods allow. Pathogenic oral bacteria have also been found within pancreatic tumors, which is another potential link between them. However, these findings barely scratch the surface of how the oral microbiome relates to pancreatic cancer. The oral microbiome is influenced by a combination of host-related and environmental factors, which include genetics, race, ethnicity, smoking, socioeconomics, and age..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Colitis and other diarrheal diseases cause serious health problems in dairy calves and are often managed by antibiotics. But heavy agricultural antibiotic use is a major driver of the global antibiotic resistance crisis, meaning there is a need for non-antibiotic therapeutics. One such potential therapeutic is ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) or its common formulation, ursodiol. UDCA is a bile acid with previously demonstrated effectiveness treating colitis but an unclear mechanism of action. In a multipronged study, researchers examined the microbiome and metabolic profiles of healthy and diarrheic calves and tested the impacts of UDCA and ursodiol in cell culture and mouse models. A core set of gut bacterial groups distinguished healthy calves from diarrheic ones and those beneficial groups were associated with microbial UDCA production, short-chain fatty acids, and other prebiotics. Further, in several cell culture and mouse models, ursodiol administration blocked bacterial growth and invasion..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

A free, brief textbook to introduce students to the core concepts of empirical social science research methods, available in PDF (main download link below) and EPUB (additional file below). This textbook has been used as the main textbook in an undergraduate social science research methods course (supplemented by many in-class exercises and research reports) and as the basis of a review in preparation for graduate-level study in research methods and program evaluation.

Contents: (1) Identifying the research question (and an aside about theory); (2) Conceptualizing and operationalizing (and sometimes hypothesizing); (3) Data collection structured by formal research designs; (3.1) Sampling; (3.2) Data collection methods; (3.3) Formal research designs; (4) Data analysis; (5) Generalizing and theorizing; (6) Evaluating research: Validity and reliability; (7) Research ethics; (8) Appendix A: More research designs; (9) Appendix B: Elaboration modeling; (10) Appendix C: Research Methods Glossary.

A note to instructors: If you use this text in any way, whether as the primary text, a supplemental text, or a recommended resource, I ask only two small favors: (1) When you make it available to students, please always include a link back to the text’s download site, https://scholar.utc.edu/oer/1/. While you are free to download and distribute the text intact under the Creative Commons 4.0 license, my preference is that you point students to this website to download it themselves. Seeing the download numbers tick up is a treat, and I plan to add additional appendices over time, so the download file will be updated occasionally. (2) Please send me a quick email at Christopher-Horne@utc.edu letting me know you’re using it. I certainly welcome your feedback as well. Thank you, and best wishes for successful research methods instruction.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory process where lipids accumulate along the arterial wall. One key protein in atherosclerosis development is AIBP (Apolipoprotein A-I binding protein). AIBP exists both inside and outside cells, but only secreted AIBP is well characterized in atherosclerosis. A recent study found that AIBP is highly expressed in human and mouse atherosclerotic lesions and that the AIBP was concentrated within the inner membrane of macrophage mitochondria. Macrophages are immune cells that can have pro- or anti-inflammatory phenotypes. The interplay between these phenotypes plays a pathogenic role in atherosclerosis. In this study, blocking the production of AIBP in bone marrow aggravated atherosclerosis and increased macrophage infiltration in a mouse model. This bone-marrow-specific AIBP deficiency increased the cleavage of the protein PINK1 (PTEN-induced putative kinase 1)..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.