A study was conducted to determine if the one-to-one method of teaching writing devised by R. Garrison was superior to more traditional approaches. Subjects were college students in four sections of freshman composition, two using the Garrison method and two using traditional methods of writing instruction. Analysis of data revealed that students…

With evidence supporting the belief that as a way of decreasing errors sentence combining offers a number of advantages for developmental writing students, a college composition instructor gave 19 developmental writing students five weeks of concentrated sentence combining study with no other instruction or writing practice. The sessions…

A two-year study investigated writing in the elementary school. Data collected included field notes from observation of a second/third grade classroom, videotapes of selected classroom activities, weekly journals kept by the teacher reflecting her thoughts on teaching in general and on writing in particular, interviews with the teacher about the…

Controversy has characterized the research on writing. On the one side are those who state that, to evaluate achievement in writing, evaluate the writing of students. On the other side are those pointing out the problems associated with direct measures of writing such as low reliability and high cost in terms of time and often dollars. The purpose…

An approach to teaching expository writing and research in support of that approach are presented in this book. The first section of the book discusses writing from given information, a technique by which teachers give students collections of nonverbal data (charts, graphs, maps, and other pictorial information) that the students must organize in…

Summarizing the best current thinking about what classroom approaches produce sound writing experiences in the first eight grades, this book offers teachers a means of checking on their own practices and perceptions about how writing can best be learned. The first chapter of the book presents a historical review of authoritative opinion regarding…

Analysis of 24 sets of journal entries, drafts, and revisions of papers written by college students in literature/composition courses suggested three stages in the process of reading and writing about literature. In the progressive stage, which is based on theories of transactional literary analysis, brief writing exercises, such as journal…

Proposing the theory that adult basic writers can learn to write better if they are taught to understand the mental processes that writing requires, this paper presents a brief teaching guide for systematic instruction in these processes. The paper first examines how ideas develop and then outlines the mental processes in rhetoric. Discussions of…

Until writing researchers understand how students respond to teacher marking techniques in composition, they risk prescribing strategies that waste teachers' instructional time. For this reason a study with a participant/observation methodology was conducted to describe and interpret student responses to writing instruction methods. The five-month…

To determine whether negative or positive criticisms written on children's creative writing would affect the mean number of words and sentences produced, a study was conducted with 31 fourth grade children. The children were divided into two groups: those whose creative writing would receive negative comments and those whose writing would receive…

Freshman composition students at a community college in Maryland participated in a study to determine whether the talk-write method of writing instruction would have a more positive effect on freshman writing than would more conventional methods of instruction. Four classes totaling 58 students were randomly divided into an experimental and a…

A pilot study was conducted on the student characteristics associated with changes in student writing apprehension. Data were collected from 300 students in freshman composition courses and 300 students in advanced (junior year) composition courses. These students completed the Writing Attitude Questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of…

A study was conducted to examine the relationship between apprehension and the quality of writing when that writing was aimed at a distant and at a familiar audience. Fifty-eight freshman English students from a two-year college were given a questionnaire to assess their level of writing apprehension. They were then asked to write two in-class…

An English teacher conducting research for a masters degree participated in a high school chemistry class and organized student journal writing in that class so that she could observe the effects of writing as a learning process. Based on the "thinkbook" writing that she and other classmembers did, especially two students who served as…

A study was conducted to determine whether subject-related writing tasks assigned in college courses (1) increased the amounts and clarity of student learning, (2) led to improved student writing performance, and (3) changed levels of student apprehension about writing. Students enrolled in two sections of courses taught by each of four…