Contradictions are inherent in the evaluation of placement test writing, contradictions that at once value and devalue writers and writing, readers and reading. In testing, the evidence for the essay's effectiveness rests almost entirely on the writer's choice of linguistic forms. The characteristics that distinguish evaluation in competency…

Some errors in adult black students' writing cannot be analyzed merely within the traditional hierarchy of grammatical rules; a look at sociological factors is germane to an evaluation of students' writing ability or inability. Data for an analysis of black adult students' writing at the syntactic level have shown that problems of clarity might be…

Results of 2 years of applying microcomputing technology in a college freshman English program at a medium-sized university are reported. Using a cross-factorial research design, six instructors and six control and six experimental sections were studied to determine the cognitive, pedagogic, and financial implications of the microcomputer…

Designed for students, faculty, and others interested in the writing program at Umpqua Community College (UCC) in Oregon, this booklet clarifies the specific function and scope of the writing courses offered by UCC's Department of Humanities. Section I states the department's objectives (e.g., to provide a core curriculum meeting the requirements…

A comparison of the usage of English articles and prepositions by native speakers of Finnish and of Finland-Swedish studied the word frequencies of these grammatical categories in three levels of English essays written by school-leavers in Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools in Finland. It was hypothesized that the poorest essays written…

Basic writers often experience difficulties when trying to articulate ideas in writing that are more specific, systematic, and fully developed than their speech. The writers must learn how to put their thinking into the appropriate forms and expressions necessary to address an academic audience. Noting that the natural working of the human mind…

Since a high percentage of Native American students who begin college do not graduate, a summer survival program was created to assist Native American students in developing their scholastic abilities. The data establishing the need for such a program were provided by a study that compared the performance of all Native Americans enrolled in…

Reader-writer conferencing was examined as an alternative or complement to the direct assessment of writing. Criteria guiding development of a framework for analysis of reader-writer conferencing were summarized as: (1) achievability; (2) transfer to other domains of writing; (3) importance of the outcomes; (4) inter-scorer agreement; and (5)…

In recent research on the computer there is an optimistic outlook, i.e., the promise of this new tool in fostering learning and literacy. But an examination of 33 studies (experimental, case, and ethnographic) also indicates deficiencies in computers and writing research. Two drawbacks seem to be the lack of rigor in both quantitative and…

A tribute to the work of Ann Berthoff, this book--a collection of 6 poems and 21 essays--explores issues in the philosophy and teaching of composition. Each of the five sections is introduced with a poem by Marie Ponsot. Essays and their authors consist of (1) "Genre Theory, Academic Discourse, and Writing within Disciplines" (James F.…

This newsletter issue concentrates on the topic of teaching written language skills to mildly handicapped elementary and secondary students, with emphasis on the communicative function of writing. The feature article discusses expository writing instruction, describing essential elements of the expository writing process and characteristics of…

Using self-instructional strategy training procedures, three sixth-grade learning disabled students were taught a series of self-directed prompts designed to facilitate the generation, framing, and planning of written compositions. The eight-step instructional procedure included pretraining, review of baseline performance level, description of the…

Of great concern among researchers is the effectiveness of holistic scoring, which is necessarily product-centered and decontextualized, in measuring writing quality, the mental processes necessary for writing, or teaching skill. The Committee on Teaching and Its Evaluation in Composition of the Conference on College Composition and Communication…

In the early twentieth century behaviorist Edward L. Thorndike began the development and use of measurement scales to replace personal judgment to evaluate student compositions in U.S. public schools. In 1912, utilizing the Fullerton and Catell equal difference theorem, Milo B. Hillegas released the first scientifically designed scale to measure…

Students who are motivated to write and learn generally pay attention to written comments on their rough and final drafts; students who are not motivated generally ignore written comments and do not use them in revision, but nonetheless are concerned about grades. One effective way of increasing student interest in writing and skill development is…