The ability to think critically is an important and valuable skill that students should develop to successfully solve problems. The process of writing requires critical thinking (CT), and the subsequent piece of text can be viewed as a product of CT. One of the strategies educators may use to develop CT is modelling. Given ChatGPT's ability to…

Set against the backdrop of children being 'alienated' from their writing, this paper is taken from a United Kingdom Literacy Association sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here, we use discourse analysis to think about the…

The purpose of this paper is (1) to report on the design of the early writing observational writing rubric designed to observe and describe change over time in the writing of children emerging into conventional literacy (ages 6-7) within an instructional setting and (2) to investigate the initial reliability and validity of the rubric. We used an…

The present study attempts to give an account of how students represent writing task in an EAP course. Further, the study is intended to discover if learners' mental representation of writing would contribute to their written performance. During a 16-week term, students were instructed to practice writing as a problem solving activity. At almost…

In this article, the authors explore the corpus of literature on creative thinking and applied creativity in higher education to help composition teacher-scholars and writing center practitioners improve the application of creativity in written, visual, and multimodal composing practices. From studies of creative thinking investigated across…

Over three days, 180 junior and senior high school English teachers, postsecondary (university and college) writing instructors, workplace (corporate and small business) writing instructors, and government officials who are responsible for portfolios related to workforce training and literacy met to understand from a broad systems-level…

Research suggests that experts and beginners use qualitatively different writing processes when given the same text to write. Throughout their writing, experts tend to create a network of executive, structural, and content problems that they continually refine and coordinate as they bring the text to fruition. Novices, in contrast, tend to focus…

Moment to moment, a writer faces a host of potential problems. How does the writer's mind coordinate this problem solving? In the original Hayes and Flower model, the authors posited a distinct process to manage this coordinating--that is, the "monitor." The monitor became responsible for executive function in writing. In two…

Students learned a strategy for planning, writing, and evaluating compare-contrast essays. Instruction followed the principles of self-regulated strategy development, which aims to improve knowledge about writing, strategic writing processes, self-regulation, and motivation. Six adolescent students, 3 with learning disabilities in writing and 3…

Discusses guidelines for the investigation and subsequent writing of a problem centered report. Examines technical writing theory and how it applies to example reports. (HTH)

Replies to Steinberg's article on protocol analysis in this issue and argues that even if the writing process is a problem-solving process, it is too complex to analyze sufficiently using protocols. (SRT)

Examines current views on revision, and notes the importance of nurturing students' revision abilities. Presents three successful approaches to teaching revision, including: naturalistic classroom support, direct instruction in the problem-solving revision process, and procedural facilitation of revision. (MM)

For several years a number of instructors at the University of Cincinnati have experimented with the concept of problem-based learning (PBL) in their composition courses. The concept, rooted as it is in Socratic method and the hands-on problem-solving advocated by John Dewey, is not new, and though some of its applications may call for adjustments…

In preparing students for business writing, a technical writing class should foster (1) a sensitivity to audience and an understanding of the business or technical organizational audience, (2) analytical problem solving that precedes any but the simplest writing task, (3) understanding of the patterns of organization that make information clear to…

Describes a technical proposal writing assignment modeled after the conditions in industry. Provides a paradigm of government project proposals and then outlines the stages of the assignment that allow student to rework and revise, thereby discouraging students from writing formulaic and superficial proposals. (SRT)