As an instructor of the developmental reading and writing course at Texas State University, Barrie McGee is required per state mandate to design a course as an accelerated version of an integrated reading and writing (IRW) course. Furthermore, she is uniquely positioned as a student enrolled in the program in developmental education to access…

In the later years of undergraduate study, students read, process, and evaluate primary literature within specific fields of study. Shifting from textbooks to the vast amounts of peer-reviewed current literature can be difficult for students. This article details an innovative approach to helping students successfully make this transition through…

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and…

Utility-value (UV) writing interventions help students find the personal relevance of course material to promote interest and performance. However, little is known about how best to frame the intervention, particularly in the 2-year college context where students have more varied backgrounds than the samples previously studied. Using a randomized…

The task of turning undergrads into academics requires teaching them to reason about the world in a more complex way. We present the Argument Complexity Scale, a tool for analysing the complexity of argumentation, based on the Integrative Complexity and Conceptual Complexity Scales from, respectively, political psychology and personality theory.…

Background: Writing is an essential literacy skill; however, public school students often receive inadequate writing instruction, particularly as they move into middle and high school. However, research has shown that the nature of writing tasks assigned can impact writing development and student achievement measured by standardized assessments.…

Writing studies' "recent enthusiasm" (Roderick "CF 25") for complexity theory has morphed into higher education's rabid embrace of reform. New curricula claim commitment to an "advanced," "networked," and "global" culture by erasing introductory composition, thereby dismissing the…

Learning to write well is a significant outcome of higher education, as confirmed and illustrated in the Written Communication VALUE Rubric of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Scholars agree that writing and thinking are linked. Thinking about this relationship between writing and thinking in the context of…

In this study, I explored the interactions among genre, task complexity, and L2 proficiency in learners' writing task performance. Specifically, after identifying the lack of valid operationalizations of genre and task dimensions in L2 writing research, I examined how genre functions as a task complexity variable, and how learners' perceptions and…

Using computer keystroke logs, this study investigated how writing skill affected L2 writers' pausing patterns to gain insights into their management of the cognitive writing processes. The 59 participants, 29 in the more-skilled group and 30 in the less-skilled group, were recruited from a college English course at a key Chinese university. The…

Argumentation can contribute significantly to content area learning. Recent research has raised questions about the effects of discussion (deliberation) goals versus persuasion (disputation) goals on reasoning and learning. This is the first study to compare the effects of these writing goals on individual writing to learn. Grade 7 and 8 students…

This case study started when I noticed that my ESL (English as a Second Language) students from all over the world had a hard time not only adjusting their writing/textual production to the language but also to the organizational structures of the paragraph I was presenting to them in my intermediate writing class. Considering that my students…

In this study, I examine the instruction of four preservice English teachers (PSTs) for cognitively demanding literature-based writing tasks in order to investigate the types of tasks that PSTs identify as cognitively demanding, how PSTs' instruction for such tasks maintains or degrades the task's intellectual rigor, and possible influences and/or…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students' understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The…