The author's search for integrated writing and science connections began years ago when he was teaching seventh- and eighth-grade science at a school for dyslexic students. Like any class, the interests and abilities of his students were all across the board. However, one characteristic all the students had in common was a reluctance to write.…

Peer assessment is understood to be an arrangement with students assessing the quality of their fellow students' writings and giving feedback to each other. This multiple-case study of seven designs of peer assessment focuses on the contribution of peer assessment to the acquisition of undergraduates' writing skills. Its aim is to arrive at an…

Recent trends in cognitive science have not made scientific literacy easier to attain, but they have made the practices through which educators meet its challenges more interpretable. Traditionally, cognitive scientists viewed knowledge as a set of propositions comprised of classical concepts, thought as logical inference and language as a literal…

Whereas there has been strong advocacy of the value of writing for learning in science, the role of student planning in this approach and the relationships between planning, writing, and learning have been underresearched. Our mixed method study aimed to address this issue by seeking to identify quantitative differences in learning outcomes…

History departments are not generally known as hotbeds of assessment activity. Doctoral programs in history rarely touch the issue of how to assess student learning, while program review as an idea appears to many historians as an invasion of their turf by outsiders. At Eastern Michigan University, members of the faculty in the Department of…

We examined the effects of in-class writing instruction, practice, peer review, and feedback on writing skills of undergraduates enrolled in a general psychology course. We rated writing for grammar, writing style, mechanics, and American Psychological Association referencing style. Significant differences emerged on the 4 writing skill domains (p…

Pairing high school seniors with elementary students to write, edit, and publish children's picture books proved to be an engaging project for the students. Seniors stayed focused and eager to work on the project and proved they had learned editing lessons by teaching them to the younger students.

The comprehensive approach to balanced literacy mandate relies on teachers understanding of the skills and strategies that reading and writing demands. State and city departments of education must look for ways to learn from the voices of English language art teachers.

This study examined the utility of three categories of CBM written language indices including production-dependent indices (Total Words Written, Words Spelled Correctly, and Correct Writing Sequences), production-independent indices (Percentage of Words Spelled Correctly and Percentage of Correct Writing Sequences), and an accurate-production…

The personal statement written for graduate school admission has been a genre virtually ignored by rhetoricians but one that deserves attention. Not only a document of pragmatic importance for applicants, the personal statement is an indicator of disciplinary socialization. The discipline studied here is clinical psychology. Combining quantitative…

There is a strong relationship between orthographic-motor integration related to handwriting and students' ability to produce creative and well-structured written text. This relationship is thought to be due to the cognitive load which results when attention is required by writers to write letters and words on the page. Lack of automaticity in…

Findings are presented from a small-scale longitudinal study of first-year psychology students' learning. Three developmental hierarchies were derived in the analysis of the interview data, which described different aspects of the variation in students' accounts of their conceptions of essay writing. Although the findings did suggest that the…

Recognizing that students shudder at revision and see it as a perfunctory task to satisfy only their teachers, the author offers an approach that motivates students to revise thoughtfully without increasing teachers' reading workload. Quite simply, good writing requires less time to read than poor writing. The Numbers Approach to grading can free…

English 116: Freshman Seminar is, according to the college catalog, the "gateway course for North Central College's integrative curriculum. [It f]ocuses on writing, reading, and critical thinking related to a specific area of inquiry [and is t]eam-taught by faculty from English and another department. Topics vary, but emphasis is on rhetoric…

In the academic ranks of schooling, writing tasks move gradually from a focus on the transmission of knowledge to the transformation of knowledge. As a more complex writing task, knowledge-transforming requires writers to engage in the rhetorical act of persuading readers of their work's value, significance, and credibility. At the graduate level,…