We argue that the literature on critical thinking in sociology has conflated two different skill sets: critical sociological thinking and higher-level thinking. To begin to examine how sociologists weigh and cultivate these skill sets, we interviewed 20 sociology instructors and conducted a content analysis of 26 assignments. We found that while…

Recent considerations of threshold concepts in the rhetoric and writing studies discipline fail to consider the role that reading plays in the learning of student writers. This article reports results from a three-part, two-year, empirical study of seventy-five learners enrolled across four sections of a writing-intensive course. The course…

This essay presents results from a comprehensive study of writing in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Pittsburgh. It is in two sections. The first section reports on interviews with faculty from across the disciplines in the School of Arts and Sciences; the second reports finding from student focus groups and from an extensive…

Suggests that the use of writing in the social studies classroom deepens the meaning and the students' understanding of the content. Discusses the use of journal writing, the guided writing procedure, interviews, and letter writing in the social studies classroom. (RS)

Provides language arts teachers with specific techniques to help content-area teachers get more writing into their classrooms. Suggests that some of these techniques might be helpful to language arts teachers themselves, especially in getting students to think about learning. (TB)

Discusses writing assignments and instructional support needed when the primary purpose of writing is to help students reformulate their subject-matter knowledge. Research on grades one-three illustrates ways in which two writing assignments offer different opportunities to learn about American history. (BB)

In this author's research, the question of whether it makes sense to think of writing primarily as a generic skill acquired increasing urgency as she gathered qualitative data for a study of the relationship between instructors' expectations in the design of writing assignments and the students' thinking as evidenced both in their essay responses…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to assess whether faculty writing workshops could facilitate writing in heterogeneous disciplines by linking specific, workaday writing activities (Tschudi, 1986) with Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives (1974). Multi-disciplinary faculty participating in writing-across-the-curriculum workshops…