Reviews psychosocial cognitive teaching methods that correctional educators are using to remediate student academic deficits: computer-managed instruction, social/moral education, and essay writing and language arts. (Contains 15 references.) (JOW)

Studied the use of an automated grader to score essays holistically and by rating traits through two experiments that evaluated 807 Web-based essays and then compared 386 essays to evaluations by 6 human raters. Results show the essay grading software to be efficient and able to grade about six documents a second. (SLD)

Presents a case study illustrating and reflecting on the process of developing an outcomes-based approach to essay writing in a university economics course in South Africa. Discusses challenges such as making outcomes and grading criteria explicit, changing feedback, and improving student writing. (EV)

This paper reports on findings relating to a project on gender and essay assessment in HE. It focuses on one aspect of the study: the assessment of and feedback given to two sample essays by 50 historians based at universities in England and Wales. We found considerable variation both as to the classification awarded to the essays and to positive…

We investigated expectations regarding a writer's responsibility to proofread text for spelling errors when using a word processor. Undergraduate students read an essay and completed a questionnaire regarding their perceptions of the author and the quality of the essay. They then manipulated type of spelling error (no error, homophone error,…

This study reports on an initiative using Meyer's (2000a) Reflections on Learning Inventory (RoLI) to bring first-year students' understandings of themselves as learners together with the expectations of their academic subjects. Students on a generic skills-based programme were asked to discussed their RoLI profiles with their academic tutor, and…

Undergraduates producing handwritten essays in university exams need to transcribe information onto the page in a rapid and efficient manner under considerable time pressure. In fact, capacity models of the writing process predict that the more automated students can make the transcription process then the more resources will be available for…

This paper reports on a series of studies undertaken at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, in the 1990s. The studies explore how students acquire academic literacy in the home and community, school and at university. The main focus is on the literacy biographies of 36 students who come from a variety of educational, linguistic and…

The marks awarded to 130 second year undergraduate word processed essays were assessed in relation to their use of different typographic features. By and large most of these features had little effect on the essay grades. However, essays printed in 12-point type gained significantly higher marks (mean = 56.8) than essays printed in 10-point type…

We investigated the use of quizzes administered prior to lecture (i.e., prelecture quizzes) and compared them to no-quiz control groups. In previous research, the success of administering quizzes after covering a topic (i.e., postlecture quizzes) was contingent on the quizzes and the subsequent exams being of similar level and content. However,…

Previous research has generally failed to find a relation between the way students approach the task of studying and their exam grades. The present study investigated why it is that a deep approach to studying, which has been shown to result in a higher quality of learning, does not consistently result in higher exam grades. The participants in…

The purpose of this essay is to introduce the concepts of self-authorship in graphic design education as part of an integrative pedagogy. The enhanced potential of harnessing graphic design's dual modalities--the integrative processes inherent in design thinking and doing, and the ability of graphic design to engage other disciplines by giving…

From an instructional perspective, it is conceivable that employing an appropriate hypertext architecture should have the advantage of facilitating learning by representing logically the interrelationships between the different pieces of information contained within the hypertext. Furthermore, there would however appear to be a sound theoretical…

Qualitative research exists in a time of global uncertainty. Around the world, governments are attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what counts as "good" science. These regulatory activities raise fundamental, philosophical epistemological, political and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the…

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.