Much of the research that has examined the writing knowledge of school-age students has relied on interviews to ascertain this information, which is problematic because interviews may underestimate breadth and depth of writing knowledge, require lengthy interactions with participants, and do not permit a direct evaluation of a prescribed array of…

Presents a systematic strategy for examining topic-related knowledge prior to writing. Discusses a theory-based rationale for the measure, a formalized method for analyzing topic knowledge, and a guide for using the instrument. (JD)

Notes how current writing research models remain of limited usefulness to the study of writing development because they do not explain important conditions such as coherence, nor do they define the systematic relationships in writing contexts. (RL)

A study examined how teachers help students to write with greater precision. Subjects, 160 freshman students, wrote a single sentence describing a wordless Peanuts cartoon. They were asked to express specific semantic relationships (sequence/cotemporality, intention/instrument, and intention/enablement) between the actions in two contrasting…

Examines how school writing tasks (notetaking, answering study questions, and essay writing) interact with three measures of learning (recall, concept application, and gain in passage-specific knowledge). (HOD)

To understand and describe a developmental learning progression of choices students make in forming chains of relationships in their narrative texts, a study used the Cohesive Harmony Index to measure cohesion in children's written narratives. Data were obtained from 36 grade school children at intervals of four months over the students' first…