The Liberal Studies Assessment Portfolio program was instituted at San Diego State University in July 1992 in response to California's requirement that prospective elementary school teachers demonstrate subject matter competency. Since many liberal studies majors transfer to San Diego State University at the beginning of their junior year, most of…

The goal of writing assessment in the Department of Mathematics at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is to assure that students can communicate about mathematics or statistics in a manner appropriate to their future careers. A five-member writing committee, composed of mathematics faculty, assess students at three different times during…

A pilot project was developed to encourage teachers to look at assessment more comprehensively and to use a variety of ways to assess learning, emphasizing a collaborative process of ongoing assessment. The project was presented as a way to show students' accomplishments as readers and writers; involve parents, teachers, and students in the…

As a result of increasing communication between the student staff of the Walk-In Service and new instructors enrolled in the course entitled Teaching Writing, Cornell University (New York) has instituted the Essay Response Consultation program. Freshman Writing Seminar instructors get free, private consultation about responding to student essays.…

Stockton State College, New Jersey, recognizes that the teaching of writing is not the responsibility of the English department alone, but of the entire college faculty. Stockton's writing across the curriculum project is designed to give all faculty members general theoretical information and practical training in writing instruction and the…

A five-week tutorial minicourse offered by the Douglas/Cook College Writing Center at Rutgers University helps students develop skills in research writing. The first service the Writing Center offers is a "term paper strategy session," in which students meet with a reference librarian to examine the various reference sources available.…

The idea-centered freshman composition program at Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, North Carolina, functions not only to meet the immediate needs of freshmen writers, but also to promote the aims of liberal education. The program has three interrelated goals: (1) to engage freshmen writers in "college thinking," defined as giving…

In response to a nationwide concern for quality education and academic preparedness, the Ohio State Board of Education created in 1983 the Early English Composition Assessment Program (EECAP) for improving the writing competency of exiting high school students. Faculty from more than 15 two- and four-year institutions and many more high schools…

Every year approximately 1,300 first-year students at the Rochester Institute of Technology complete a 50-minute placement essay during summer and fall orientations. The essays are scored holistically, and the students are placed into one of three levels of an English composition course. At the end of the 10-week quarter of instruction, students…

The Highland (Indiana) public schools developed a writing program for elementary school students based on the premise that children learn to use language by actively generating language. The program features language production as the principal student activity in the English class and uses the students' own written work and oral expression as the…

The writing across the curriculum program at Michigan Technological University was designed to change teacher and student attitudes about course-assigned writing as well as to change writing practices by means of a series of faculty workshops. After four years, a team of seven faculty members from rhetoric and composition, literature, psychology,…

A city planner's writing is usually not "technical" in the sense that the writing of engineers is technical. In each planning genre, extremely complex information, some of it "technical"--numbers, projections, and so forth--must be communicated clearly. For the professional planner, there are often severe time constraints and the need to proceed…

The development of the portion of a basic skills test that would adequately assess the writing ability of entering college freshmen in New Jersey is described in this paper. The stages of the test development process that are discussed include the decision to incorporate a writing sample in the form of an essay on a specified topic, the selection…

An Oregon school implemented a program of journal writing in grades 5 to 8 and evaluated its effects upon the language arts curriculum and students' writing ability. Each of the 11 teachers in the project decided the amount of time to allocate to journal writing and the routines to establish, although all followed certain guidelines on…

Noting that few curriculum projects designed to teach effective writing skills have been evaluated through carefully planned, longitudinal research studies representing cooperative efforts between university and public school personnel, this report describes such a project. The report outlines (1) the purpose of the program, which was based on the…