Intended for researchers, teachers, local and national policy makers, and others interested in writing, this volume explores the processes and development of writing, particularly in the context of writing instruction. Following a preface, the introduction discusses various perspectives on the activity of writing, such as writing as a cognitive…

This report describes the procedures followed in scoring the October 1978 Florida Minimal Writing Production Skills Assessment and reports the results of that assessment. The assessment was conducted on a sample of Florida public school students in grades 3, 5, 8, and 11. Sections include descriptions of the rating scale and scorer's guide as well…

A study examined several possible indicators of the quality of student writing to see what relationship, if any, existed among those indicators and the holistic scores given by raters to compositions written for the University System of Georgia's Regents Testing Program. The indicators examined were (1) total number of sentences, (2) average…

Since 1979, New York State has been working on an instrument to evaluate elementary school students' writing ability. Several thousand writing samples were obtained and were analyzed, by a test development committee consisting of elementary school teachers, qualitatively within each grade as high, average, and low, and in terms of organization and…

Good and poor explanatory essays of 40 college freshmen were analyzed for 18 cohesive ties and chains to determine the appropriateness of the cohesion system for teaching and evaluating writing. The questions that were specifically addressed were, (1) How do writers use the cohesive resources of the language? and (2) How is cohesion related to…

Writing samples as diagnostic measurement tools have many variables that the instructor must control--time is a factor, and often the instructor needs more than one sample to fairly evaluate student writing ability. One method for better predicting the exact nature of students' writing problems is sentence combining. For sentence combining to be…

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 four-year study by the Bay Area Writing Project was conducted to determine the writing competency of inner-city secondary school students on proficiency tests. To determine whether patterns among secondary students reflected developmental trends, the study also examined samples of student writing from grades 4 through 12, for the years 1978,…

One area of the writing process that has received considerable attention is revision. A case study was conducted to generate a picture of the effects of revision on texts, the writers' intentions and perceptions, and readers' assessments of the written products. Three students--Dan, Alex, and Miranda--enrolled in a required expository writing…

The purpose of this study was to examine the stability of measures of student writing performance across types of discourse (genres) and across response modes (selected response: multiple choice; constructed response: single paragraph, and full length essay). The study addressed the following: (1) the relationship/stability of writing scores…

Competency in the three skills areas of reading, writing, and mathematics is a requirement for high school graduation in the state of New York. The writing competency requirement consists of two tests: the Preliminary Competency Test in Writing, given to students in the eighth or ninth grade, and the Regents Competency Test in Writing, given to…

The result of a review of 160 documents, including research reports, theoretical essays, position papers, and journal articles, this report provides a synthesis of literature concerning composition in kindergarten through grade 12. The report presents theoretical, conceptual, organizational, and implemental materials concerning the concrete and…

A theory of textual processing signals--cues to guide the response of any reader to a narrative text--can be evolved from Gerald Prince's theory of reading interludes and William Labov's work on narrative evaluation. An examination of these signals in two personal experience narratives written by students in remedial and freshman writing courses…

In response to the decline in thinking, reading, and writing skills, as indicated by the latest report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, this paper offers elementary school teachers one framework for a classroom writing program to cultivate a reading-writing-thinking connection. Based on six categories of B. Bloom's taxonomy…

Twenty 10th grade students participated in a study designed to identify differences in the ways developing writers use words to create written texts. Essays written by the students were holistically evaluated and then analyzed for the types and the number of lexical cohesive ties used and the nature of the grammatical subject, or focus, of each…