Indiana's declining SAT scores prompted the publisher of a statewide magazine covering the literary, performing, and visual arts to take action and create a program to use the magazine as a supplemental resource for students. It was believed that such a supplemental resource could enhance critical thinking and writing skills and help raise SAT…

The purpose of this action research project is to motivate elementary students in writing, specifically in the areas of creativity, detail, and accuracy. The teacher researchers wanted to develop self-motivated and knowledgeable writers. This project was conducted from September 2nd, 2008 to January 30th, 2009. The targeted students enjoyed…

This evaluative study focused on a program of nine-week courses in English writing skills which has been part of the English curriculum at City College (California) since 1966. After a review of the historical development and the rationale for the courses, results from a student questionnaire, from a retrospective comparison of students who had…

Forty freshmen at Dillard University (New Orleans, Louisiana) completed the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, an original criterion-referenced test of specific reading skills, and an in-class theme on an assigned topic. Results of the analysis of reading and writing skills established a high relationship between the two skill areas: the better writers…

To determine the effectiveness of a program for reteaching writing skills, students from ten intermediate classrooms in three schools, who achieved poor scores on a screening instrument or received teacher evaluations indicating low skill levels, participated in this study. An experimental group of 78 subjects received a pretest, a program of ten…

A study compared the exclusive use of an electronic speller, the exclusive use of a personal spelling dictionary, as well as the use of a combination of the two, as tools for students to increase their consistent use of standard spelling. Subjects, 21 heterogeneously grouped fifth-grade students attending a suburban elementary school, completed a…

As a solution to the problems presented by approaches to teaching English composition that are almost purely cognitive in nature, an experimental course was offered for freshmen at the Miami-Dade Community College. The course was designed to be holistic and confluent, synthesizing both the cognitive and affective domains by incorporating Gestalt…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a study of Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric of the sentence in enhancing the syntactic fluency of seventh graders as measured by Kellogg Hunt's normative data, and it identified demographic and syntactic features which affect student writing performance. The study involved 149 students and three…

In order to formulate instructional hypotheses and research directions, a profile of seven-year-old children's behavioral patterns associated with the writing process was sought. Eight case study children were chosen from two formal and two informal classrooms in a middle class community. Secondary focus was on gathering data from larger groups in…

In order to determine if there is a significant difference in the capitalization skills, punctuation skills, and word usage and sentence structure recognition skills of students who have had one year of shorthand instruction, two sample groups (shorthand and non-shorthand) were obtained from three English populations (no English or nongrammar…

This dissertation describes the basic features of four interdisciplinary writing courses at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), explaining briefly how and why they arose. For example, the "adjunct" course featured the conjunction of a writing class and another class on campus (e.g., in political science or history), thus…

This research focuses on a program for improving spelling achievement through an integrated approach using high-frequency words. The targeted population consisted of a third grade class, a fourth grade special education resource class, a sixth grade language arts class, and an eighth grade language arts class. All classrooms were located in rural…

A survey of attitudes of students in the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) toward writing was analyzed in terms of total population and in terms of ability subgroups established by a diagnostic examination of writing ability. Results were compared with results from a similar survey of the 1974-1975 CGSC class, which was analyzed…

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on the value of role playing as a method of writing instruction. Four classes of freshman composition comprised the sample: one early and one late class as experimental, and one early and one late class as control, with no significant differences between the two at the start. Each group was taught five…

The primary purpose of this investigation was to determine if increasing the number of types of sensory stimulation prior to a writing experience would help children to write more creatively and to write longer stories. The sample for this study consisted of 300 randomly selected fourth, sixth, and eighth grade students from the Silver Bay area, a…