Drawing on a study involving interviews with 20 students each semester until graduation, this article examines how participants understood and articulated their writing processes and how they perceived those processes changing over time. Although they initially struggled to find language to describe what they were doing when they wrote, falling…

The study aimed at investigating the effects of peer feedback on students' English writing ability in L2 writing class. A mixed-methods research, an embedded experimental design was employed, making use of a writing pretest and post-test and self-written reflection in the experiment. Data were quantitatively analyzed through a dependent simple…

Lecturers are challenged when creating safe, dialogic-educative spaces for first-year students (freshman), where optimal teaching-learning of academic writing can be accomplished. This paper reports on a project aimed at creating a safe, dialogic-educative space in which first-year students may attain and practice academic writing skills providing…

A study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the intellectual maturity of college students and evidence of rhetorical maturity in their writing--specifically, why some students write better than others, since general language abilities cannot account for all the differences between good and poor writing. By focusing on college…

A series of three studies looked at argument across significant contexts to understand what students must learn to "argue" in these contexts and carry out their practices. Study 1 involved 19 pre-college minority writers who were asked to take a "rival hypothesis" stance to their source texts that discuss issues in minority…

An exploratory study was conducted to define broadly some indices of student writing development. Student essays prepared by high school seniors and third-year university students outside the classroom were collected for analysis. The essays were drawn from four disciplines--English literature, history, geography, and biology--and represented the…

Reports on two case studies of writing development in the primary grades. Notes the impact of teacher's questioning techniques, both on student development as writers and on teacher ability to evaluate student progress. (RL)

A study examined the analytic writing development of high school seniors and college students. Subjects, approximately 50 high school seniors and 100 college students, performed two writing tasks on the same topic, one for an audience in agreement and one for a hostile audience. About a third of the subjects made taped protocols of their writing…

A 1985 study of students at Ferris State University (Michigan) found that the majority of freshmen improve their writing abilities from their beginning English course to the end of their freshman year, with ability levels changing little after that. In the current study, graduating seniors were studied to evaluate growth in writing throughout the…

One of a number of reports of a study of the writing development of 14- to 16-year-old students, this booklet is divided into two parts. The first part uses five criteria to analyze what four secondary students learn from composing imaginary stories: (1) What resources are used in the setting or situation? (2) What kind of ordering is used? (3)…

A comparative study examined the extent of growth in overall writing quality of college freshmen to determine whether feedback from the instructor during planning and the composing process (especially on the computer) was more effective than another instructor's feedback during conferences on each final, graded writing product in the students'…

This research examines how a developmentally appropriate educational program in the early years can affect the development of gifted children. The qualitative research specifically focused on a multi-age, multi-ability setting with partial implementation of a whole language program, a systematic writing process and with some flexibility in…

Focusing on the development of students' writing skills and on the instructional techniques used to promote those skills, this report relates the findings of the second phase of the National Study of Writing in the Secondary School. In addition to further analysis of data collected during the first phase of the study, the report provides…