A college teacher and student describe the rationale behind collaborative test taking and their efforts to implement it in a freshman English course. The approach, in which students learn to work collaboratively from the beginning of the course, allows participants to solve problems related to a writing task and teaches real-world work skills.…

A program was developed and implemented for use with college freshmen at a community college in southeast Florida whose entrance examination scores fell below the acceptable range for admission into a regular English classroom. These students lacked an adequate background in basic English language skills, had an insufficient understanding of the…

A study was conducted at Florida's Brevard Community College (BCC) to determine the effectiveness of using artificial intelligence software to teach Freshman Composition. At BCC, Freshman Composition is taught in the computer lab, with student using WordPerfect to type their essays and Writer's Helper to flag various writing deficiencies. The…

Many essayists on writing believe that a student's level of cognitive development determines the organization of thought expressed by the student's writing and that an individual cannot use language at a level that goes beyond his or her stage of cognitive development. Without the maturation of formal operational structures, students cannot easily…

Gifted students' writing may exhibit stylistic dissonance--a mixture of basic writing features may coexist with features indicative of much higher levels of rhetorical control. A case study of an 11-year-old sixth grade student who attended a freshman composition course at an Arkansas university illustrates this dissonance. The poems and short…

Examines the loss of an individual's culture while learning the discourse of academia. Suggests writing topics and assignments that not only help students mediate between school and home cultures, but serve as a base for ongoing teacher research into the ways in which home and university cultures interact. (RAE)

Evaluates a project in which two library liaisons assisted freshman English students in writing library research papers. The need to develop new bibliographic instruction programs in conjunction with teaching faculty is also discussed, noting that this revives the aggressive 19th-century scholar/librarian model. (27 references) (KRN)

The implicit assumption behind personal writing assignments given at the beginning of a writing course is that personal essays eliminate the writing apprehension of having nothing to say. However, college freshmen find it very difficult to write about themselves and their own opinions because this writing involves abstract mental processes and…

Assigned to teach a freshman composition course with a history and reading co-requisite, a New York college instructor developed a course in which students would begin to see history--through their reading, writing, and thinking--as a series of events intricately connected with their own lives and ways of looking at the world, rather than…

An alternative curriculum for Freshman Composition, designed to help students develop cognitive skills useful for academic writing in other courses, involves eight discipline-specific assignments, building from relatively simple writing tasks such as taking lecture notes and keeping an academic journal, through book reports, essay examinations,…

Shows the advantages of using word processors in freshman composition classes that use the instructional technique of peer evaluation. Points out that the benefits are practical for both evaluators and composers, and suggests how to implement a computerized peer evaluation system. (SKC)

Suggests an alternative understanding of imitation, according to which a student learns by imitating another person, rather than a text or process. Proposes that composition teaching works when it effectively models an identity which students can accept. (MS)

In this author's research, the question of whether it makes sense to think of writing primarily as a generic skill acquired increasing urgency as she gathered qualitative data for a study of the relationship between instructors' expectations in the design of writing assignments and the students' thinking as evidenced both in their essay responses…

Secondary and postsecondary students who use the read-answer-discuss strategy while studying read ineffectively and do not comprehend or retain main ideas. A study examined the effectiveness of (1) the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, (2) conceptual mapping, (3) a combination of those strategies, and (4) reading and underlining main ideas as…

To provide students with a rhetorical stance and motivation, a college freshman composition class adopted the ideas of the "radical" literacy educator, Paulo Freire, who believes that literacy should allow students and teachers to become truly conscious of the world. Class projects were initiated in which the students had as much…