In this article, the author discusses a graphic narrative or comic book writing assignment in greater detail to demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of teaching comics in the writing classroom. She argues that by assigning students a comic book project, writing instructors can promote competence in academic discourse by helping students learn and…

Investigating the comparability of students' performance on TOEFL writing tasks and actual academic writing tasks is essential to provide backing for the extrapolation inference in the TOEFL validity argument (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). This study compared 103 international non-native-English-speaking undergraduate students'…

This article describes a three-year study assessing change in critical thinking demonstrated in essays written for regular class assignments. A rubric was designed and scorers trained to assess critical thinking holistically without knowledge of the writing prompt or author's status. The longitudinal improvement in scores earned by freshmen over…

Google Docs, an online word processing application, is a promising tool for collaborative learning. However, many college instructors and students lack knowledge to effectively use Google Docs to enhance teaching and learning. Goals of this study include (1) assessing the effectiveness of using Google Docs in an out-of-class collaborative writing…

In a study in 1996, the Consortium on Chicago School Research found that many classroom assignments in writing and mathematics made only modest academic demands on high school students. In this study, the nature of assignments in schools participating in the Annenberg Challenge reform effort in 1998-1999 was studied, to determine whether teachers…