Based on a writing program evaluation project that took place in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, this booklet provides administrators and policymakers with a plan for evaluating their own writing programs and also provides results of the Ferguson-Florissant evaluation. The first chapter contains…

The first of a planned series of papers, this document describes in detail a context for writing created by a teacher and her second grade class. Section one includes the teacher's diary of plans for using an imaginary doll, "Mr. Togs the Tailor" as a context for learning during most of a term and selected children's writing on such topics as Mr.…

Most of the 24 books reviewed in this annotated bibliography concern writing and are recent publications (1980-1985). Titles and authors are as follows: "Teacher" (Sylvia Ashton-Warner); "What Did I Write? Beginning Writing Behavior" (Marie M. Clay); "Composing: Writing as a Self-Creating Process" (William E. Coles);…

A workshop was developed at the Bank of Canada to give instruction in writing brief summaries of financial analyses to junior economists entering the bank after university. These employees were expected to write these analyses for the senior officers of the institution. It had been found that the specialists had not learned strategies for…

For basic writers, learning to write means learning new syntactic and textual forms and new ways of relating to an audience. This means that students must have certain kinds of knowledge about what differentiates writing from speech and what distinguishes sentences and texts/paragraphs that are focused and explicit. In addition, an enabling…

After students recommended books by M. E. Kerr, such as "Is That You, Miss Blue?" and "Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack," a college teacher realized that Kerr's books contained memorable characters and were suitable for classroom use. Particularly useful was Kerr's 1983 nonfiction book, "Me, Me, Me, Me, Me," which recounts…

Facing the problem of a wide discrepancy in grading standards for student essays, the English department at a Texas community college developed a standardized method of grading students' expository and persuasive essays. The department established a committee of 10 full-time instructors whose objective was to standardize grading for all required…

The relationships among time perspective, mood, age, and an academic grade point average (GPA) and goal-writing abilities were investigated in 123 senior baccalaureate nursing students from three university programs. Time perspective--past, present, and future--was measured by an Experiential Inventory, Circles/Line Test, and two Opinion Surveys.…

Four issues of a University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) newsletter by and for teaching assistants (TAs) are presented, with focus on writing, grading, undergraduate instruction, and plagiarism. Topics include: making writing assignments that are clear and provide clear grading criteria; writing with computers, writing by scientists and…

A study was conducted at Snow College to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of college remedial courses with that of regular courses of study. The study compared the performance of 48 students in four sections of a remedial English class with that of 24 students with similar skill levels enrolled in a freshman composition course. The…

A new core curriculum at Newmann College (Pennsylvania) aims to provide liberal learning through cross-disciplinary instruction without destroying the identity of specific content areas. The Collaborative Probing Model (CPM) provides a basis for the kind of creative self-control that will lead to flexible work within and between disciplines. This…

Written by teachers for teachers of elementary school students, the 20 articles in this collection are designed to provide insights into the way children learn to write and to encourage teachers to examine their own theories and perceptions of writing and writing instruction. The articles are grouped in five sections. In the first section, six…

A study sought to determine the relationship between grammar competency and success in a business communication course. Students completed a written English competency test consisting of 25 sentences, each with one of eight kinds of errors, including comma splice and incorrect pronoun reference. Students were then asked to choose the one…

The second in a series of manuals designed for instructor/coordinators of Richland College's cooperative education seminars, this volume contains two learning modules focusing on nonverbal communication and business writing. In addition to stating student objectives and listing additional resources, each module introduces basic concepts and…

This report is about the education plan of the District of Columbia Public Schools for the 1981-82 school year. The first chapter describes the philosophy, goals, and instructional and achievement priorities of the board of education and superintendent; outlines categories of student competencies; summarizes 1980-81 performance data on the…