Surveys of employers continually highlight the need for better communication skills among recent college graduates. Yet, writing instruction in higher education serves far more than a transactional purpose. Writing facilitates learning, helps students gain skills in analysis and synthesis, and supports a range of other personal and intellectual…

Although peer review has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefits of peer review to the reviewer, or the student giving feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in second-language writing research. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing: giving or receiving…

Evaluative criteria implicit in written comments on student writing can embody a definition of text which leads students to see text as superficial and formal instead of deep and meaningful. Students develop their perceptions of professors' values from the cues they receive via comments. A major problem, especially among faculty from different…

Compares the rhetorical context of essay exams with that of assignments written outside of class. Reports differences in pedagogical function, prompts, rhetorical function, mechanics, style, and organization. Refutes two common assumptions: that essay exams are not a genre and that they work against students' mastery of writing process skills.…

Intended for teachers, this paper considers response to student writing, looking at the different angles from which it is commonly perceived and acknowledging the complications that evaluation and the demands of curriculum add to that response. Three major areas are examined. There is an historical look at response, so that some of the roots of…

A model for assessing student writing achievement uses sets of criteria to chart students' writing progress that are based on a study of exemplary samples of student writing produced at various stages of development. The model provides a viable alternative to assessment methods that call for students to produce lengthy essays on preselected topics…

A survey of writing research indicates positive directions for teaching composition: reflecting developmental patterns in curriculum guides; emphasizing prewriting and revising strategies; giving priority to problem solving and creative thinking skills, attending to rhetorical issues like purpose and audience, and conducting research in the…

A study examined how college students wrote a critique of a sociology article; which features of written critiques were valued most by professors in the discipline; and whether students' educational level and status predicted the quality of their critiques. Subjects, 32 students enrolled in an upper-level sociology course, read and responded by…

This digest offers an overview of current research in the ERIC database on methods and measurements for evaluating student writing. The digest considers: (1) methods of response to students' written products; and (2) the measurement of quality as represented by effective classroom teaching methods. (SR)

Discusses the deficiencies of the various methods of evaluating children's writing, especially the writing of children for whom English is not the native language. (FL)

A study examined how a portfolio might be utilized to present student growth, or lack of growth, in narrative writing within a 12-week period. It addressed the problem of establishing specific portfolio assessment criteria for narrative writing samples, and effectively utilizing portfolios as an evaluation tool for parent/teacher/student…

In the spring semester of 1997 an ethnographic study of the teaching of personal narrative at Boston College was conducted. A doctoral student worked with an undergraduate who wrote a personal narrative about her alcoholic father. Two issues arise when teaching autobiographical writing: potential problems with psycho-cognitive distance between…

To assist second language teachers, administrators, parents, and other teachers to better understand how foreign language instruction helps students develop literacy skills, this paper discusses research about the commonalities between first and second language reading and writing. It is an outgrowth of the North Carolina State Board of…

This paper analyzes two student papers, "Pygmalion" and "Waiting to Inhale," in terms of the type of thinking demonstrated in them. It examines the difference between higher order patterns of thinking evident in advanced or adult writers and patterns of thinking in young writers or students. The study reported in the paper…

Based on a survey conducted in 1992 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a study examined the types of writing students performed in school, the quality of their classroom writing, and the relationship between their classroom writing and their performance on the NAEP writing assessment. A nationally representative subgroup of…