The guide provides enrichment suggestions for teaching personal writing skills to gifted and talented intermediate students. The unit is organized according to objectives, entry skills, teacher's approaches, student activities, resources, and followup/evaluation. Topics covered include the following: formal and informal diction; sentences to…

Prepared to accompany an Australian letter writing guide for students, this teachers' guide provides suggestions for integrating letter writing into the school curriculum, either through regularly scheduled activities during the school year, or through special letter writing units of a few weeks. Topics covered in the guide include: (1) the craft…

These guidelines have been developed to assist California State Department of Education staff members in organizing a manuscript so that it is clear, and will require a minimum of rewriting, editing, and keyboarding before it is sent for publication. The intention is to give staff members a better idea of what is expected of them as authors, and…

This paper connects recent research with common student problems in writing research papers and offers an analysis of the range of synthesis tasks and some reasons why students have difficulty with the demands of these tasks. The paper focuses on the student's problem of not knowing how to think about material in ways that allow him or her to say…

The North Carolina Annual Testing Program assessed the writing skills of students in Grade 6 and Grade 8 in the 1989-90 school year. Sixth-grade students were asked to write a clarification composition focusing on a special day and explaining to the reader why the day is special, and eighth-grade students were asked to write a letter to their…

Designed to provide information to administrators at Housatonic Community College, Connecticut (HCC) on the status of writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs, this report presents an overview of WAC, strategies for its implementation, and examples of WAC programs currently in existence. Introductory sections present a brief history of and a…

This study involved the selection and adaptation of a writing assessment procedure for teachers and researchers in the Duval County Public Schools (Florida) to use in assessing changes in writing ability among elementary grade students. Through a review of the literature, four writing assessment procedures (analytic, holistic, focused holistic,…

To discover what college courses of study were most beneficial to established television and radio journalists, a survey was conducted of the persons in charge of 434 television stations and 362 radio stations. The study, similar to previous studies, asked whether the journalists had attended college and where, which of their college courses they…

This practicum implemented a quality circle approach with the English faculty of a large public high school to devise and synthesize practical methods of evaluating student writing into a collection or handbook. The target group, 14 English instructors who indicated on a pre-practicum survey various degrees of frustration with their school's…

The initial report of the National Research to Development Network for Public School Programs for the Hearing Impaired provides a review of objectives and process in educational research, a description of the network, and descriptions of three completed or ongoing projects. A brief history of educational research and development precedes a…

Instructors of professional courses such as advertising copywriting need to exercise caution in assigning grades to their students' creative work. Some alternative assessment methods can equally emphasize process and product. One successful technique is "praiseworthy grading," which shifts the focus from fault-finding to appreciation of…

This study examined the effect of news writing instruction in freshman composition to determine whether the diversity of instruction would result in improved writing performance and attitudes of students. Data were gathered from 71 students at a private Oklahoma college randomly assigned to three control groups (taught by a traditional approach)…

The argument is presented that good writing begins with adult inner speech that ignores audience and then gradually evolves into a form of communication adding the vital component of audience into its focus. It is suggested that when second language writers are not trained to go beyond the inner speech in their own language, they do not have the…

A study focused on families whose children were successful but not exceptional students in kindergarten. Subjects were eight parents (all mothers) whose children had been enrolled the previous year in a kindergarten program that maintained a whole language curricular orientation. The children (four girls and four boys) were highly successful in…

The Detroit Public Schools High School Improvement Project (HSIP), a four-year program beginning with the 1981-82 school year, improved levels of student achievement in basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills at participating schools. Improvements were also a little greater than those at comparable non-participating schools. This final…