As more and more writing process oriented teachers must oversee, design, and execute classroom intervention studies, a discrepancy arises from the inappropriateness of the process style to the product orientation of research. In establishing experimental procedures, researchers try to account for all variables, but for process-oriented teachers,…

Whereas previous research on writing focused on measurable aspects of written products, more recent research has focused on the processes of writing, using such research methodologies as laboratory case studies, naturalistic studies, quasiproduct studies that interpret results in terms of process, and studies that have unique procedures as a…

A study was conducted to identify characteristics of young children's written compositions that might be used to indicate growth patterns. Written compositions of 482 children of all ability levels, grades 1-3, were examined by two teams of teacher-researchers and placed on a continuum of sophistication. Four growth strands were identified: (1)…

In a study to determine whether the writing apprehension of college writers is diminished by regular freewriting and whether apprehension affects the quality of writing, two experimental classes spent ten minutes freewriting each day while two control classes spent ten minutes on vocabulary building. The pretest and posttest consisted to two…

This report presents the results of a national survey of college and university writing program directors that was undertaken to provide reliable and current information about writing programs at the college level. The first chapter contains a discussion of the survey questionnaire and sample population. The next nine chapters report the responses…

A study of the effect of an "incremental" version of a generative rhetoric approach to writing instruction was conducted to determine whether such an approach would increase students' syntactic complexity. Ninety-eight college students were randomly assigned to one of five experimental or five control sections of a freshman composition…

A study was conducted to ascertain if the teaching of sentence building by means of specific sentence patterns would result in an increased use of these sentence patterns in the written compositions of second grade children. Writing samples were obtained from a group of second grade children both before and after the treatment and were analyzed…

A study was undertaken to observe the prewriting processes of four high and four low writing apprehensive college students and to explore any composing patterns that seemed characteristic of the two groups. During the study, each of the eight participants attended at least four 90-minute sessions that were designed to document the complex…

To compare the relative reliable uses and cost effectiveness of the analytic, the holistic, and the primary trait scoring methods, an inquiry was conducted in which a group of raters scored a large number of secondary school students' essays according to each of the scoring methods. Raters were nine graduate students in English who were trained in…

Noting that writing laboratories at the high school level are gaining more attention as high school personnel learn to adapt successful college programs to their own needs, this paper provides information about a laboratory program that was designed to offer tenth through twelfth grade students individualized instruction both to remediate writing…

Because of dramatic changes in the technology of written communication, college graduates are now producing letters, memos, and reports by dictating for word processing systems. Case studies from structured interviews with 28 people in business, industry, government, and the professions show that the composing process of writers who use the new…

To be effective, composition teachers should keep four things in mind. First, writing is as much a process as a product. To understand this, teachers must themselves write, so that they will experience the satisfaction of discovering ideas and viewpoints. Second, individual students' composing processes should be carefully identified before any…

A study was undertaken to assess the effectiveness of a new rhetoric program of composition instruction for secondary school students. The lessons used in the program were designed to provide students with a step-by-step procedure for moving from a topic sentence to a unified, coherent paragraph. Using the primacy of the topic sentence, they led…

Observations of the developing writing patterns of one child over a period of five years brought insight to the question of how children learn to write. The patterns, identifiable in other areas of child development, were the processes of differentiation and decentration, the sometimes nonparallel growth of form and function, and an increasing…

The results of two large scale assessment efforts by the United States Department of Defense Office of Dependents Schools (DoDDS) are set forth in tabular form in this booklet. First described is the initial DoDDS assessment of composition skills--administered to several thousand eighth and eleventh grade students in the spring of 1978--that…