Traditionally, assessing student writing ability has often been product-focused. Advocates of child-centered process-oriented classrooms, however, suggest that teachers should also focus on understanding children's writing behaviors in the context of meaningful communicative tasks. In such an approach, writing conferences are one way in which…

Describes three approaches to language arts instruction--student centered/integrated, content centered/segmented, and a combination of these two--and examines the strong and weak points of each. (HTH)