Peer tutoring has a long historical precedent in western civilization. Since its reemergence in the United States during the 1960s, it has been used for every age group, subject matter, and level of intelligence. Numerous research studies have shown the benefits of peer tutoring, its efficacy in the college writing center has caught the attention…

Based on a writing program evaluation project that took place in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, this booklet provides administrators and policymakers with a plan for evaluating their own writing programs and also provides results of the Ferguson-Florissant evaluation. The first chapter contains…

Provides an integrative review of experimental treatment studies on the teaching of composition in the past two decades. Assesses the effectiveness of different modes of instruction and different focuses of instruction. Outlines the implications of the results for policy at local, state, and national levels and for future research. (RDN)

A teacher education course on reading in the content areas had two goals: (1) to embody, rather than talk about, the reading-writing connection; and (2) to effect through a workshop setting a community of learners among the participants. Students were required to select, adapt, and apply instructional strategies from a variety of textbooks and…

In "The Politics of Education" Paulo Freire considers writing evaluation to be the expression of educational ideologies. An examination of the scholarly writing in composition and rhetoric research shows a division between formative or process evaluation and summative or product evaluation, with advocates for each side. As readers,…

Many writing process researchers have shown that students make only minor mechanical changes instead of revising their documents significantly. Effective revision pedagogy must address this problem by encouraging revision of content, arrangement, and style, and by directing student attention to all levels of the document, from the overall essay…

Contains comments on "The Teaching of Writing and the Knowledge Gap" by Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. and on "Reference Sources for Composition Research: A Practical Survey" by Patrick Scott and Bruce Castner. (EL)

Noting that while writing teachers acknowledge that responding to their students' writing is central to their teaching, they still express frustration about how to make their response effective. This book describes a two-part study conducted to discover how the nation's most successful writing teachers respond to their students' work. The first…

A study was conducted to compare the writing performance of tenth grade students across three modes of discourse. Subjects were 80 students who had been classified as "masters" or "nonmasters" of writing based on their scores on the writing section of the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills. The students were assigned three…

Using the right hemisphere of the brain in evaluating student writing means consciously and consistently incorporating its emotional, intuitive, and holistic functions with the more analytical functions of the logical "left" hemisphere when considering, judging, and directing improvement in student writing. Research seems to suggest that…

A small scale research project involving teaching writing skills to slower learning students in three different Scottish schools is the focus of this volume. Chapter 1 discusses the context and nature of the project, while chapter 2 presents teachers' accounts of their professional practices in teaching writing, including their perceptions of…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The eight titles deal with the following topics: (1) the literacy demands of clerical workers; (2) reading as a composing process; (3) relationships between reading and writing performance; (4) the effects of instruction in…