The synthesis of four instructional models for argumentative writing--the Toulmin, Hiduke, Winder, and Crebbe-Debate approaches--with basic discourse theory produces a practical and positive method of teaching college students to write effective persuasive essays. A battery of questions based on a modified communication triangle--subject…

The kinds of life events that may affect cognitive development were explored for 777 students, mostly freshmen, enrolled in introductory social science courses at Western Washington University Bellingham (Washington). Cognitive functioning was assessed using the Measure of Epistemological Reflection (MER) of M. B. Taylor (1983). Students also…

The purpose of this paper is to compare the precision of direct and indirect measures of writing assessment using the test information functions from a graded response Item Response Theory (IRT) model. Subjects were 192 sophomore English students from a parochial high school in Wisconsin. Both direct and indirect measures of writing ability were…

A study examined the relationships between the quality of writing on composition examinations and topic selection, outlining, rough drafting, and revision. A sample of 1,372 grade twelve students' essays was examined. Among the issues examined were how topic selection affects the final essay score, if and how selection of topic affects the type or…

Essays focusing on creativity in the humanities and sciences are contained in this proceedings of the Creativity and Science Conference. The presentors, who represented many academic disciplines, agreed that creativity is as essential to the scientist as to the humanist and that one can prepare for it but not instruct or be instructed in achieving…

The Registered Holistic Scoring Method, which has been used for one year to score the ninth grade writing test of the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test, is described. Registered Holistic Scoring was developed from the previous holistic approach in order to provide more reliable scoring guidelines year after year. Two trained evaluators…

During the 1984-85 school year, pupils in three age groups participated in an international survey to discover ways in which pupils are taught written composition, what they write, and how their achievements are assessed. The three age groups were: (1) those who had reached or were approaching the end of the class-teacher stage, (2) those who had…

To learn more about the initial effects of word processing on essay-writing performance and on writing apprehension, eight English instructors at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, conducted a one-semester controlled experiment with freshmen in eight randomly selected college writing classes. Eighty students wrote essays using terminals…

Intended for teachers, this monograph argues that, unlike the structured, formulaic "school" essay, personal essays in the manner of Michel de Montaigne lead students to explore their connections with ideas and texts. The monograph describes several strategies which use writing as a tool for critical thinking. The monograph contains the…

The graded response (GR) model of Samejima (1969) and the partial credit model (PC) of Masters (1982) were fitted to identical writing samples that were holistically scored. The performance and relative benefits of each model were then evaluated. Writing samples were both expository and narrative. Data were from statewide assessments of secondary…

A "modified essay examination" was used to help teach and to assess clinical problem-solving skills with 11 first trimester doctoral students. This examination provided a paper-and-pencil simulation of problems encountered in case management. Students were required to generate hypotheses, formulate questions, discuss issues, and make…

Twelve essays by contemporary scholars explore, from a historical perspective, the meaning of collegiate coeducation in the United States, including its value, utility, significance, and successes and failures in supplying equal education for both sexes. An introductory first section contains the essay "Coeducation in a Gender-Stratified…

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…

Tautologies in student essays, arguments that most commonly assume the truth or self-evidence of themselves without relationship to something other than themselves, can be identified whenever an essay contains a series of nonsuccessive, noncumulative discourse units. Three kinds of tautologies in student papers are tautologies of redundancy,…

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…