Describes an informal classroom research project that explored how children perceive the changes they make in their writing and what they think about when they write. (HTH)

Twenty-one learning-disabled eighth and eleventh graders wrote essays and answered a questionnaire concerning metacognition. Subjects were comparable to normally achieving sixth graders in their essays' interestingness, clarity in communication of goals, word choice, paragraph structure, and metacognition about the writing process. (Author/JDD)

Explores the patterns in children's talk about their writing, by means of transcribed conversations during daily writing/sharing sessions in a first grade classroom. Discusses the importance of this kind of talk. (HTH)

In order to blend writing process with introduction to library, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga developed generic model of library research having three stages (pre-library, library awareness, library competence) that parallel stages in writing process. Library use is presented as series of activities including searching, retrieving,…

To demonstrate how discourse tasks can differ in their cognitive difficulties, students in a graduate course on the teaching of writing participated in a procedure called "invisible writing." The purpose was to show the students that as they took on more cognitively demanding writing tasks, their ability to produce coherent discourse…

Reports the highlights of the first year of the National Study of Secondary School Writing, which provides new information about secondary school writing instruction. (RL)

Presents results of an experiment seeking relationships between motor activities and more central language production processes. Concludes that the same motor program was used for occurrences of repeated morphemes in the experiment. Reports that nonrepeated morphemes were recovered from verbal memory while the preceding repeated morpheme was being…

Students write a great deal during their school years, but they apparently never realize that writing affects their lives outside of school and can often even be important to their success. Research on the composing process has enabled teachers to separate the writing process from its product, but theory, practice, and research still focus on the…

Comparing the effectiveness of several comprehensive computer-assisted writing tools, this final report on the Writing Tools Project evaluates five IBM programs--"Writer's Workbench" (WWB), "HBJ Writer,""Rightwriter,""UNC-CH Write," and "Writing Is Thinking"--and two Macintosh…

Discussion of the use of microcomputers as word processors in basic writing classes highlights the improvements in students' writing skills. Changes in teachers' approaches to writing courses are discussed and results of a study of 24 students in a basic writing course using microcomputers at Montclair State College are presented. (Author/LRW)

A 6-month case study of one adult composing in both his native and second language was undertaken to examine the complexity of second-language composing and the relationship between processes in the two languages. Two thinking-aloud protocols were collected from the subject, who was composing in response to a writing task. The first data were…

Describes study designed to investigate students' attitudes and strategies when writing with the aid of a computer. Interviews with four undergraduates enrolled in a computer-assisted section of advanced composition are discussed, and participant observation and document analysis are also used to examine the combined processes of composing and…

An experiment in which students were required to keep journals during a civil engineering course is described. Student benefits (journals as problem-solving tools and forums for personal comments), faculty benefits (sources of background information and use as evaluation/recordkeeping tools), and five major conclusions are discussed. (JN)

Compared to 92 low-achieving and high-achieving students, 46 intermediate grade learning-disabled students wrote compositions, wrote summaries, and produced comprehension recalls that were less organized and contained fewer ideas. Interviews indicated that learning-disabled students possessed less knowledge about processes related to…

Reports on a study of 78 letters of recommendation for a higher education teaching position comparing letters written by women and men. Finds that the letters are written differently and vary by the applicant's gender. Also finds that women are much more likely than men to describe collegiality than intellect. (CFR)