This study investigated the preferences of students of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) for the form in which a writing prompt is given. Subjects were 142 college students with intermediate to advanced English language skills. Each student was offered 10 potential essay topics, each containing a prompt in the form of either a…

Organized in eight short sections, this paper presents guidelines for students attending New Hampshire Community Technical College at Manchester for writing term papers and short essays. The paper's sections are: (1) Outline (outlining the paper's contents); (2) Setting the Parameters (containing a definition of a term paper); (3) Sections of a…

A series of administrative and pedagogical questions about class size and the training of graduate teaching assistants caused the director of the freshman English program and the head of the Humanities department at Michigan Technological University to assemble an experimental class in freshman English. The course consisted of 113 students and 9…

The job of teachers of composition is to teach students how to write, and what they teach them to write is the school essay. Yet, if they stop to see the school essay for what it really is, they will discover that for all their humanistic claims of wanting to give students voices, the genre is one that actually works to exclude many of these…

This book contains 25 essays on the subject of industrial relations divided into the following parts: Essays and their authors are as follows: "The Context of Collective Bargaining in American Colleges and Universities" (Kenneth P. Mortimer); "Transformation of the U.S. Collective Bargaining System: The Impact on Higher Education" (James P.…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate why lecture notes aid expository writing after a 1-week delay between lecture acquisition and essay writing. Experiment 1 examines the context hypothesis that deactivation of lecture schema must occur before attempts to reinstantiate context can aid writing. Results with 74 undergraduate students did…

A lesson in essay planning designed for college and graduate students of English as a Second Language is described. The intended audience is a group with varied linguistic backgrounds and levels of English proficiency. The lesson's objective is to develop metacognitive skills for planning well-organized essays. A computer program using graphics,…

Wofford College, like many other schools, assigns a book to its incoming freshmen each summer for them to read before they arrive on campus in the fall. The goal is for them to share a common intellectual experience and to see right away that the emphasis of a liberal arts education is learning though reading, thinking, and discussing. This…

This study used qualitative research procedures to evaluate the learning impact of a long term (3.5 years) leadership education program on participants' cognitive models of leadership. Situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and communities of practice principles (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002) were used to develop research…

Overviews of the process of historical research and the writing of a successful historical essay or dissertation are presented. Historical research is defined as the systematic process of collecting and objectively evaluating data related to past occurrences to arrive at conclusions about the causes, effects, or trends of past events that may be…

The Test of Standard Written English (TSWE) is a 50-item multiple choice instrument designed to assess the ability of college students to use English. In this study, based upon a sample of 45 students, the TSWE was revalidated with writing samples. The coefficient of 0.54 was most impressive given that the TSWE scores were restricted to those…

Recall data from eight eleventh-grade students were analyzed to determine the effects of writing tasks on recall of content and relationship units at three levels of importance in the content structure of 21 prose passages. The data were colelcted as part of an earlier study of the effects of three writing tasks (notetaking, answering study…

A model exit examination for a community college English composition course is presented, along with a discussion of the evaluation criteria used and the content areas assessed by the examination. First, methods of objectively evaluating written examinations are discussed, and analytical scoring methods are contrasted with the holistic scoring…

The booklet presents the two-part Grade 12 Diploma Examination for the Social Studies 30 program. Part 1 consists of 70 multiple-choice questions worth 70% of the total score. Each question has four choices and students must choose the one which best completes the statement or answers the question. Many questions are based on narratives,…

Students in New Zealand and several other countries were tested in writing skills near the end of their formal (secondary) education, as part of the International Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) tests. Among the categories tested were functional letter writing and narrative, persuasive, and reflective essay writing. New Zealand student…