This purposes of this presentation were to: (1) document the gap between self-assessment and faculty assessment of students' writing ability at Saginaw Valley State University; (2) analyse possible causes for the gap; and (3) suggest four ways to review the gap. Survey data were gathered from introductory history, political science, management,…

A total of 47 twelfth grade students from five different English classes and the six teachers in the English department at a secondary school in Canada took part in a study to determine what effects traditional grade-based writing evaluation procedures had upon the process of writing. There were three distinct yet related components to the…

Intended for composition teachers who see "editor/writer" conferences as the ideal teaching strategy, this booklet offers a procedure for training tutors--staff or students--to respond skillfully to a writer's work in a one-to-one context. The first half of the booklet discusses theory and research regarding the tutorial process and some…

Writing research has long sought to identify the internal features of written discourse that help to explain qualitative differences among student texts. Reflecting the theories of the Prague School linguists, this study used a topical structure analysis to distinguish between the sentences and T-units of 48 college freshman essays evaluated as…

Students write a great deal during their school years, but they apparently never realize that writing affects their lives outside of school and can often even be important to their success. Research on the composing process has enabled teachers to separate the writing process from its product, but theory, practice, and research still focus on the…

To demonstrate that peer evaluation is an appropriate means of improving written composition, particularly in terms of audience and goal orientation, the use of peer evaluation as a teaching method is discussed and then the connection between peer evaluation and audience awareness is drawn. Based on observation of Dutch 17-year-old students, the…

A study compared the effects of retesting (with and without the benefit of short term instruction) on the scores of subjects in an upper-division university who had failed a writing test. Subjects who did not receive a passing score in their first attempt at the essay test were given the opportunity of attending a 4-hour workshop designed to…

This is a preliminary report on an ongoing research project examining the "Current Index to Journals in Education" indexing of two major, general interest academic library journals: the "Journal of Academic Librarianship" (JAL) and "College and Research Libraries" (C&RL). The data are presented "as is,"…

This case study examined one advanced undergraduate student's efforts to write on similar topics for three different audiences--an advanced composition class, a history of Western philosophy class, and a district meeting of Pi Alpha Theta. Initially the student was juggling the demands of writing research papers for her two courses, and the third…

Decentering, as defined by Jean Piaget, occurs when the mind considers and coordinates experience from more than one perspective. Focusing on decentering in two parts of the writing process--discovery and audience awareness--a study examined the relationship between the personal and impersonal decentering abilities of college freshmen and their…

As a by-product of a study concerning how university level writers develop new genres of discourse, a study was undertaken to examine what factors or dimensions affect the composing process of university writers. Six undergraduate students at Carleton University in Ottawa participated, making available to researchers information about how they…

Effective writing assessment involves judging how well a writer is encouraged by the classroom's social context to pull together ideas and to bring experience to bear on abstractions. Four main points can be made to justify this view. First, assessment by standardized test determines a teach-and-test model of instruction. But a curriculum that…

Freshman composition students were given six assignments designed to help them examine, analyze, and put their memories into context so that the students could use their memories to begin exploring and creating their own "truths" through language. Two essential types of memory were identified: (1) natural memory, memorizing word for word, which…

A study evaluated the effectiveness of a teacher-researcher program begun in the Fort Worth Indpendent School District to improve and assess students' writing abilities. The study sought to determine if there was a noticeable improvement in the writing skills of students studying with the teacher-researchers as opposed to students studying with…

Without support, financial, organizational and otherwise, the U.S. national IEA writing study would never have been conducted; however, implementation of the study was difficult. Planning for the study and its support commenced in 1980, coterminous with two important occurrences: the National Institute of Education pulled back on its interest in…