Describes several types of "paragraph frames" to help teach beginning writing in the content areas. Notes that these frames, employing a modified cloze procedure, help bridge the gap between narrative and expository reading and writing. Provides several student writing samples. (MM)

Dominant features of the rhetoric used in the "American Educational Research Journal" (AERJ) are discussed to illustrate how arguments are constructed and how a conception of the world of education is formed. These features include conventions of format; impersonalized and passive sentence constructions; and references to prior research.…

Studies the strength of writers' memories for their texts immediately after writing and the degree to which this remembrance endures over time. Demonstrates that students do remember much of the texts they write and may have difficulty making changes. Urges instructors to use techniques that allow writers to focus on reprocessing strategies beyond…

Reports on classroom experiments with replacing standard student report-style papers with more expressive, explorational writing assignments. Outlines how course readings are used as the basis for a paper that takes the form of a series of letters or postcards to an imaginary or real person. Provides examples from student projects. (DSK)

Discusses how teachers can support students in primary grades by establishing an environment that is conducive to inquiry and by helping children develop basic research skills. Highlights procedures for teaching students how to write informational reports, and describes how the procedures were applied in a third-grade and a first-grade class. (KB)

Developed an analytic rating scale for Japanese university students' first-language (L1) expository writing. Devised a questionnaire to investigate Japanese L1 teachers' criteria for evaluating expository writing, and, based on questionnaire results, eliminated or reorganized the descriptions under six analytic criteria. (Author/VWL)

The ability to clearly communicate what was learned as the result of an experiment is a key component of science in general, not just science in the middle school classroom. Here, the authors state that in their eighth-grade classrooms, they have focused on their students' ability to write quality conclusions at the end of every laboratory…

The Challenge Index ranks high schools according to how many students take AP and IB exams, not on how well they do or how many pass. This index is published in Newsweek and the magazine calls it "America's Best High Schools." In this article, the author, also the creator of this index, answers some frequently asked questions about the index and…

This article explores commonalties between literacy instruction and learning to understand the symbolic languages of the visual and performing arts. A detailed case study of an urban professional development program for secondary arts teachers looks at the learning initiated by writing assignments that prompted students to reflect on arts…

This paper undertakes a review of the literature on writing cognition, writing instruction, and writing assessment with the goal of developing a framework and competency model for a new approach to writing assessment. The model developed is part of the Cognitively Based Assessments of, for, and as Learning (CBAL) initiative, an ongoing research…

Over the last 3 decades or so, English and its related disciplines of Rhetoric and Composition have adopted new tools of research--tools other than the traditional ones of narrative and description. These other tools are empirical or scientific, those that are common to the social sciences, including experiments, case studies, surveys, and…

This paper presents guidelines for students attending New Hampshire Technical College at Manchester who are preparing term papers or short essays, and can serve as guidelines for students in other colleges as well. The paper discusses the outline; setting the parameters; sections of a term paper; text format; documentation; bibliographic format;…

This guide begins by offering advice to students who have been assigned to write a research paper and hints to teachers for ways in which they can facilitate the process for their students. It then presents detailed guidelines for students in nine steps: (1) Selecting a Topic; (2) Narrowing the Topic; (3) Formulating a Preliminary Question Outline…

This handbook, that can be used as a reference tool, is designed to introduce the researcher/writer to the customs of a community of writers who value scrupulous scholarship and the careful documentation, or recording, of research. Chapter 1 suggests some of the educational and intellectual purposes of research and describes the first steps in a…

College students are often faced with a variety of writing assignments which might ask them to analyze data showing cause and effect, compose a sonnet, or creatively analyze a classic short story. To tackle these kinds of assignments, they must disregard traditional and often misleading definitions of analytical and creative writing which lead…