The purpose of the study was to determine the effective leadership characteristics of graduate students working in a collaborative setting. A secondary goal was to develop recommendations that will help faculty better utilize group collaboration as a learning experience for graduate students. Data consisted of interviews of graduate students who…

When writers plan a document together, they rely on gestures as well as speech and writing in constructing a common representation of their group document. This case study of a student technical writing group explores how group members used gestures to create a conversational interaction space that they then treated like a physical text that they…

Active investigative student-directed experiences in laboratory science are being encouraged by national science organizations. A growing body of evidence from classroom assessment supports their effectiveness. This study describes four years of implementation and assessment of an investigative laboratory course in human physiology for 65…

Report #27 in this series discussed the 'wiki' method of online information-sharing, and its educational uses. A wiki is browser-based collaborative writing environment, in which a community may amass and exchange information on a particular topic, and to which anyone may contribute without having Web programming skills. In the current study,…

Social-interactive Writing for English Language Learners (SWELL) is collaborative writing based on Topping's Paired Writing Method. The method was changed to meet the needs of English language learners. In both methods, pairs are formed according to proficiency, pairing a more advanced student (a Helper) with a less advanced one (a Writer). The…

Imaginative writing is a great vehicle for creative thinking and risk taking as children structure a reality in a story. However, the author believes that American children are untrained for this sort of work and progress. They need connected experiences. This insight intensifies the author's resolution to seek collaboration with artists in other…

Many business and technical writing students find classroom discussions of professional ethics interesting and enjoyable. However, when trying to incorporate the content of discussions directly into their writing practices, they often experience difficulties linking ethical concepts to writing process. This article discusses how instructors can…

A study examined the nature of interactions that occurred among the participants of a two-year collaborative writing project with a particular focus on the manner in which they "positioned" one another. Subjects were three students (who were all in the sixth grade at the start of the study and in eighth grade at the end) who had…

In recent years the High Romantic concept of the solitary author has been intensely challenged. Compositionists and various theorists have deconstructed the concept of isolated authorship and critiqued the Romantic notion of individual genius. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of the female literary tradition introduced the question of gender and…

Combining the journal writing process with the concepts of collaboration can produce more focused writing and learning. Through the channel of collaborative situations, such as group journal writing, teachers can capitalize on the benefits achieved from the collaborative process and cultivate thinking and writing skills. A group journal writing…

Exploring how new technologies and new pedagogies transform and are transformed by existing institutions, this book presents 14 essays that discuss network-based classrooms in which students use communications software on computer networks to converse in writing. The first part of the book discusses general themes and issues of the ENFI…

A collaborative, oral-history, writer's workshop was held in an undergraduate college reading class. Sixty-five students each taped an interview on literacy life-experiences with a self-described reluctant reader at the middle or high school level, and wrote a narrative based on the interview. Students worked together in groups on their…

A study examined how collaborative writing groups functioned in a Madison, Wisconsin high school classroom. The class in the study was ninth-grade English "Academically Motivated" (which is neither high nor low tracked). The researcher spent the first 9-week quarter in the classroom observing, taking field notes, teaching some of the classes that…

The collaborative student essay invites exploration of various points of view in multiple voices. The co-written essay brings out language's heteroglossic richness, as shown by the students' collaborative writing experiences in a college writing class. Students worked within the frames of two assignments: (1) an analysis of a text or trend; and…

One researcher found that the most productive collaborative learning approach has at its core a communally evolved metalanguage to generate and maintain ongoing dialogue among students and between students and their teacher. A shared metadiscourse about writing was established in the classroom by working in small groups to determine qualities of…