To evaluate the writing ability of Colorado students, a study collected writing samples from third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh grade students in 127 public school districts and 27 private schools during October 7-11, 1985. Samples were scored in a two-day scoring session using two rating procedures--a general impression of writing characteristics,…

To assess the effectiveness of various composition evaluation methods, a study asked two freshman English classes to respond to three questionnaires on the writing of personal essays and methods of evaluation they had experienced. Responses indicated that all students had a fear of having their essays evaluated. Evaluation methods considered a…

A study examined the effect of reading ability on 60 seventh-grade students' narrative writing quality, use of descriptive and evaluative t-units, use of storytelling linguistic cues, degree of revision, and between draft self-assessing inferences about intentions, problems in fulfilling intentions, and predicted revisions. Subjects wrote two…

The study of reading-writing connections involves appreciating how reading and writing work together as tools for information storage and retrieval, discovery and logical thought, communication, and self-indulgence. There are numerous benefits that can be accrued from connecting reading and writing. Thus far, for example, the research data have…

This paper integrates several contemporary issues, all of which focus on the teaching of human developmental theories. These issues include postmodern thought, higher level thinking processes, introducting conceptual conflict and arousal, motivation, and integrating the writing process into the psychology curriculum. Each issue is briefly…

A study examined the role of talk in the writing act. The study utilized participant observational techniques in an attempt to discover how talk was implicated in all stages of writing. Subjects were three fourth, fifth, and/or sixth grade informants, with one student emerging as the key informant in the study. Results indicated that talk appeared…

A study examined the assumption that writing is a way to learn by examining the relative effects of writing and studying as learning aids. The study also explored the role of individual differences in an effort to identify features of the writing process that may influence what students learn through writing. The experiment used think-aloud…

Re-entry female students are unique in one particularly important way: they respond and grow under even the most difficult conditions. The classroom and the text are two contexts in which the factor of gender appears to have affected these students' attitudes toward writing and their expectations as writers. Central to both of these contexts are…

A study analyzed and described the writing development of 24 children in a multiethnic inner city classroom in Canada to learn whether there were measurable differences among native speakers, bilinguals, and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) beginners. Writing samples were analyzed for describing, interpreting, generalizing, and speculating…

A study examined the semantic modifications students made to their texts in a structured revision task. Nineteen grade 6 students revised a book report they had previously written in class. Students: (1) added or deleted information from their texts in specific places identified by the experimenters through semantic frame analyses; (2) judged…

This report brings together data from three cycles of replication and serves as a summary of the findings of the Learning Disabled College Writers Project at University of Minnesota-General College. From July 1985 through September 1988, teachers and researchers examined the impact of microcomputer word processing on the classroom performance of…

To investigate the use of classroom journals to improve teachers' instruction, a study analyzed teachers' dialogue learning logs and collected data on teachers' response patterns. Subjects were teachers of college writing who were participating in a five-week summer seminar for doctoral students in rhetoric. Teachers responded to classroom…

Reflecting the large role that writing assignments play in teaching and testing, a great quantity of research and published discussion exists which examines issues in designing writing topics for assessments. Because the immediate purpose of an assessment instrument is to measure students' writing proficiency, writing tasks that push students to…

The relationships between the understandings children develop while learning the written form of their own names and those developed while learning other words were examined in a study. Twelve children, aged three, four, and five, were selected. The study involved three tasks which examined the subjects' expertise with letters, numbers, and the…

A study was conducted to establish a process for evaluating the difficulty of different handwritten letter forms. A criterion for calculating difficulty scores was delineated and four sets of letter forms were evaluated: manuscript, cursive, italic, and D'Nealian. Using the criterion, small letters were given a score of difficulty, the sum of…