Various approaches have traditionally been used to evaluate college students' writing performance. The College Outcome Measures Program (COMP), designed to assess and improve college programs, offers new ways to collect writing samples that include responses to reasoning and problem solving tasks. Thus, the effectiveness of written communication…

A study explored the effects of word processing on the revision strategies of 20 advanced college freshmen enrolled in a required writing course. Subjects were divided into two groups of 10, each of which alternately wrote a series of four essays on and off the computer. For each essay students submitted three drafts, which were analyzed for…

A collaborative effort on the part of teachers from and consultants for the University of California, Irvine/California Writing Project, this guide presents ideas for teaching writing as a process at all levels of the curriculum. Each section of the guide presents an essay introducing the section topic, followed by practical ideas for teaching…

Intended for administrators and policy makers as well as teachers, this digest explores the components common to effective writing programs. The digest first discusses activities at the classroom level as the foundation of a successful writing program and elements that should be included in classroom instruction, such as the process approach to…

Intended for use by teachers at both the college and the secondary school level, this booklet describes a method of getting students to write using the motivation theories developed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. The first chapter of the booklet reviews Maslow's basic principles as they apply to the teaching of writing, but includes a…

A study explored the notion of writing as a sociocultural act in order to discover whether and how native cultural literacy and literary influences manifest themselves rhetorically and stylistically. Data were collected from 223 students in Australian grades 6 through 11, and representing three linguistic and cultural groups: Vietnamese,…

Data compiled from more than 2,000 member institutions of the National Testing Network in Writing were the source of this guide to writing assessment. Using an interdisciplinary approach, with insights from cognitive psychology, sociology, linguistics, educational measurement, rhetoric, and English education, the book gives suggestions on…

One of a series dealing with current issues affecting language arts instruction, this paper focuses on writing across the curriculum. The paper begins by observing that schools and colleges across the country are developing school-wide writing programs, the purposes of which are to improve writing, to enhance learning of content, and to develop…

The impact of a writing-across-the-curriculum program on the professional life of a single university department and on the pedagogical life of an entire campus community is the focus of this book. The essays in the first section explain writing across the curriculum and provide a context for collective writing research. This section demonstrates…

Designed for students in a community college introductory psychology course, this booklet provides course assignments and ideas to improve students' writing. The booklet covers the following topics: (1) course writing assignments and the steps in preparing summaries of readings; (2) academic honesty and ways to avoid plagiarism; (3) the use of…

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)…

A collaborative effort on the part of teachers from and consultants for the University of California, Irvine/California Writing Project, this guide presents ideas for teaching writing as a process at all levels of the curriculum. Each section of the guide presents an essay introducing the section topic, followed by practical ideas for teaching…

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…