A study investigated the cognitive and grammatical activities carried out during writing by 22 incoming freshmen and 20 upperclass college students. It was hypothesized that the upperclassmen's compositions would be judged better in quality than those of the freshmen, and that the upperclassmen would show fewer pauses in which they were…

Research studies have pointed to a similarity between reading and listening that may imply that listening to writing is likely to be a useful means of evaluating it. Therefore a study was designed to determine the extent to which holistic scores assigned to student essays by readers correlate with holistic scores assigned to the same essays by…

A study examined the revisions made in expressive and persuasive compositions by 14 good and 14 average writers in grades 5, 7, and 11 to determine if grade- or ability-related differences occurred in the quality and kinds of revisions made and if revisions differed for the two types of compositions. Students wrote compositions one day and revised…

To determine what effect the perceived audience and purpose of a written piece has on its quality, 30 high ability and 30 low ability writers were selected on the basis of a college placement examination and instructed to write two essays. Half of the students were given specific rhetorical contexts (audience and purpose) as well as topics.…

Four experimental reading-treatment classes (n=94) and four control classes (n=100) wrote pre- and post-compositions which were evaluated for overall quality, syntactic density, T-unit length, productivity, and selected grammatical errors. Analysis of results found significant differences in reading skills but no differences in writing skills. The…

A study was conducted at Riverside Community College in California to evaluate by ethnic group the enrollment behavior and academic achievement of first-year students who completed assessment testing and were recommended for placement in a pre-college-level writing course. The study sample included the two cohorts of students who enrolled at the…

This research examined the results from direct and indirect writing assessments to determine the most effective method of discrimination. The New Jersey State Department of Education developed a test for ninth-grade students which was designed to measure the ability to apply writing mechanics to written text and to communicate effectively in…