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Institutions using directed self-placement to assign incoming students to composition courses may seem more welcoming toward new students-especially those deemed "at risk33-by explicitly embracing students3 digital literacy backgrounds.
For many new college students, enrolling in a first-year composition course remains a key marker of the transition to postsecondary education. Such a course frequently focuses on writing skills that incoming students will require for academic success during their college careers. And because new students often enroll in such a course during their first year (or semester) of college, it plays a unique role in many students' first-year experience-especially because it typically is characterized by small class size and close interaction with faculty, factors that may enhance retention efforts and student acclimation (Powell 2009).
Even though a first-year writing course remains a nearstandard component of the college experience, its content and thepath students take to enroll in it are not so standard. Two recent changes at a public, land-grant institution with a selective admission policy and an undergraduate population of approximately 10,000 spotlight these variables (Indiana University 2015, University of Wyoming 2015a).
First, the university revised and refocused its general education program (the new program launched in fall 2015). One change involved shifting away from a university-wide vertical writing requirement to a communication requirement, which reflects a national trend toward rethinking the role and definition of writing curricula, including the first-year composition course (see, for example, University of Kentucky 2015). "Communication" courses at the university will now feature consolidated instruction in writing, oral communication, and digital communication. Second, in 2013, the university's program for students admitted conditionally and deemed at risk launched a directed self-placement (dsp) process. The DSP enables incoming students to self-determine an appropriate, desired level of academic support for the cohort-based cluster of general education courses they take during their first year, including (but not limited to) the first-year composition course.
The convergence of these two changes, which occurred independently, challenges the institutional community to begin to consider two key questions of broader national importance-as well as a possible relationship between them:
* What do students experience in a first-year writing-now "communication"-course in the context of this particular university?
* How do students who are admitted conditionally come to enroll in composition courses, whether...