Researchers have documented connections between student motivation/proactive student behavior and academic success. This study investigates if early participation on course message boards is connected with success in online and hybrid courses. Investigating 12 first-year writing classes, eight hybrid and four fully online, the authors found that first posters on course message boards had better grades than the class final average in every course, and later posters tended to have lower grades than the course average. The researchers also correlated course performance with average length of posts, finding earlier posts to be longer. This study was conducted in two phases, with the researchers initially investigating six courses and then engaging in a more robust analysis with additional metrics of six additional courses. The results provide teachers with evidence to support the connection between student volition and success in classes that rely heavily on learning in asynchronous writing environments.

This article reports the background, methods, and results of a 7-year project (2007–2013) that assessed the writing of undergraduate business majors at a business college. It describes specific issues with writing assessment and how this study attempted to overcome them, largely through a situated assessment approach. The authors provide the results of more than 3,700 assessments of nearly 2,000 documents during the course of the study, reporting on scores overall and for each rubric criterion and comparing the scores of English and business assessors. They also investigate how two curricular interventions were evaluated through this assessment project. Although overall, the writing of these business majors was assessed as good, results showed noteworthy differences between the scores of English and business assessors and a noteworthy impact for one of the curricular interventions, an effort to improve the material conditions of writing instruction. The authors conclude by discussing some next steps and implications of this project.