One of a series dealing with current issues affecting language arts instruction, this paper focuses on writing across the curriculum. The paper begins by observing that schools and colleges across the country are developing school-wide writing programs, the purposes of which are to improve writing, to enhance learning of content, and to develop…

The impact of a writing-across-the-curriculum program on the professional life of a single university department and on the pedagogical life of an entire campus community is the focus of this book. The essays in the first section explain writing across the curriculum and provide a context for collective writing research. This section demonstrates…

Designed for students in a community college introductory psychology course, this booklet provides course assignments and ideas to improve students' writing. The booklet covers the following topics: (1) course writing assignments and the steps in preparing summaries of readings; (2) academic honesty and ways to avoid plagiarism; (3) the use of…

Reader-writer conferencing was examined as an alternative or complement to the direct assessment of writing. Criteria guiding development of a framework for analysis of reader-writer conferencing were summarized as: (1) achievability; (2) transfer to other domains of writing; (3) importance of the outcomes; (4) inter-scorer agreement; and (5)…

A collaborative effort on the part of teachers from and consultants for the University of California, Irvine/California Writing Project, this guide presents ideas for teaching writing as a process at all levels of the curriculum. Each section of the guide presents an essay introducing the section topic, followed by practical ideas for teaching…

Using self-instructional strategy training procedures, three sixth-grade learning disabled students were taught a series of self-directed prompts designed to facilitate the generation, framing, and planning of written compositions. The eight-step instructional procedure included pretraining, review of baseline performance level, description of the…

Of great concern among researchers is the effectiveness of holistic scoring, which is necessarily product-centered and decontextualized, in measuring writing quality, the mental processes necessary for writing, or teaching skill. The Committee on Teaching and Its Evaluation in Composition of the Conference on College Composition and Communication…

In the early twentieth century behaviorist Edward L. Thorndike began the development and use of measurement scales to replace personal judgment to evaluate student compositions in U.S. public schools. In 1912, utilizing the Fullerton and Catell equal difference theorem, Milo B. Hillegas released the first scientifically designed scale to measure…

Students who are motivated to write and learn generally pay attention to written comments on their rough and final drafts; students who are not motivated generally ignore written comments and do not use them in revision, but nonetheless are concerned about grades. One effective way of increasing student interest in writing and skill development is…

A study investigated the role that writing plays in eleventh grade students' understanding of literary texts. Classroom observations, collected student writing, interviews with the teacher, and interviews with six case study students--two from each of three classes--provided a portrait of teaching methods, writing tasks, and student responses to…

To gauge students' reactions to a teacher's written comments on final drafts of their papers, a questionnaire was administered to 197 students in six sections of freshman composition. Most of the students responding to the questionnaire were majoring in engineering, computer science, or business. Their six instructors had similar criteria for…

Developed from a comparison of the writing performance of eighth grade students in Delaware with a representative national group, this writing resource guide provides a detailed description of the state's writing assessment procedure and offers educators guidance in evaluating student writing and improving student writing skills. After describing…

Intended to stimulate teachers to make use of their own experiences at the writing desk and in the classroom workshop to discover what is meaningful about writing and teaching, the articles in this collection reflect what the author has learned over the years through writing. The articles in the first section emphasize the writing process, and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) teachers' written comments on the transactional writing of high school seniors; (2) the effect of a training program on the fluctuation of raters' scoring of…

Developed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, this booklet contains the competencies, item specifications, and sample items for the language arts competency tests for grades three, seven, and ten. Each competency statement contains a brief description, sample items, content, question form, and response form. The booklet also offers…