A 3-year longitudinal investigation indicated that form errors in printing that children make can aid in the identification of at-risk or failure-prone pupils as early as the start of prekindergarten. Two samples were selected, one consisting of 104 and the other of 63 prekindergarten children. Mean age of the samples was 52 months. Item analysis…

The social contexts students need to encourage productive collaboration in their writing can be provided by attending to various design features of the English microcomputer laboratory. Collaborative learning offers a powerful alternative to traditional classroom teaching methods and helps students become part of a community that approximates the…

Vocational rehabilitation facilities can vary greatly from the standpoints of the client populations they serve and the services they provide. Therefore, to be maximally effective, training manuals for the staff at vocational rehabilitation facilities must be developed at the individual facility at which the staff training is taking place. This…

Six instructional units offer guidance in the process of writing printed educational materials. Each unit provides objectives, writing exercises and activities, and end-of-unit discussion questions. Unit 1 considers the first steps in writing, emphasizing the importance of varying instruction according to student needs and background and…

This presentation describes the rationale and major steps in the development of the Teacher's Test of Language Skills (TTLS) to be administered to selected certificated teachers in the Charleston County School District, South Carolina. The paper recounts the factors underlying the establishment of the School Board's policy, then traces the major…

The South Carolina Basic Skills Assessment Program (BSAP) is discussed in a question/answer format. The 20 questions present information regarding the requirements of the legislation as it impacts classroom instruction, parental notification and involvement, recordkeeping, local school curricula, additional instructional materials, developmental…

Two individualized writing programs, useful for mainstreaming learning disabled students into the English classroom were field tested among 100 seventh and eighth grade students in four school districts. The document reports on the results of "Mission WRITE," the design of "Touchstone WRITE," and the strategies used in teaching…

Several analyses were performed as part of the process of validating a recently developed scale to measure the attitudes of students toward writing. The Florida Writing Project Student Survey is a 25-item measure of writing attitudes designed for use with students in grades six through twelve. It was developed to assess the attitudes of students…

To help students organize and integrate new information with past knowledge, college reading teachers can offer students cognitive schemata that sort information into general and specific concepts. Without this ability, students will be unable to comprehend, analyze, synthesize, interpret, or transfer information. In addition, they will be unable…

Addressed to classroom teachers, this booklet illustrates ways student enterprise projects offer uncommon opportunities for students to write and ultimately produce materials having social value. It is suggested that, for elementary school students, teachers can structure enterprise projects involving play. For example, one teacher invited…

A study assessed the ability of 20 eleventh grade students to recognize particular stylistic features when reading and then to use such features in their writing. Half the subjects were given a model paragraph from an Edgar Allen Poe story, without having the story identified for them, while the other half received only a verbal summary of the…

This document describes how computer assisted instruction and word processing can combine the systematic coverage of a writing class with the individualization of a writing workshop. Ways to revise computer programs for use in a writing course are reviewed and currently available relevant programs are detailed. The act of word processing itself is…

To determine how writers who differ in editing performance respond to operationally defined categories of errors in different kinds of written texts, a study asked novice and expert editors to correct and comment upon three kinds of error (consulting, intuiting, and comprehending) in two tasks (a self-written essay and three essays written by…

A study examined the effect of topic-specific background knowledge on the general quality and local coherence of student writing. Ninety-seven tenth grade students were assigned two writing tasks on specific topics at two points during a semester. J. Langer's measure of topic-specific knowledge was administered prior to each writing task. Each…

People construct macrostructures to reduce and organize incoming semantic information. When they make a prediction on a paper's outcome based on the work's first sentence or paragraph, readers are using preliminary input to construct a macroproposition about the paper's focus. The macrostructure may be explicitly stated--either in the opening…