The purpose of a study undertaken by the Center for the Cooperative Study of Instruction was to learn if a set of instructions could be prepared for students of composition which would indicate in behavioral terms what kind of writing was expected of them. These instructions, called "cognitive maps" consisted of a strategy and an exemplar which…

Sequenced writing assignments--a series of related writing tasks--offer students frequent opportunities to write and to acquire writing skills through redundancy, progressively more complicated cognitive and rhetorical demands, and a diversity of learning activities. The most frequently identified goal of sequencing is to move students beyond…

Thirty-seven secondary and four college English teachers in Maine participated in research on a two-fold problem: late adolescents' indifference to writing and their typically superficial themes. The secondary teachers planned 12th-grade writing sequences integrating the study of composition and literature and relating it to problems of immediate…

The implicit assumption behind personal writing assignments given at the beginning of a writing course is that personal essays eliminate the writing apprehension of having nothing to say. However, college freshmen find it very difficult to write about themselves and their own opinions because this writing involves abstract mental processes and…