This handbook describes Teacher Workshop. Teacher Workshop is founded on the idea that learning to teach is a great deal like learning to write. That is, learners need to be fully engaged in the process and learn the skills along the way as they are ready for them. Also like writing, the skills of teaching are developed over time with instruction,…

Handwriting has a low status and profile in literacy education in England and in recent years has attracted little attention from teachers, policy-makers or researchers into mainstream educational processes. This article identifies a substantial programme of research into handwriting, including studies located in the domains of special needs…

This peer-evaluation assignment encouraged students to think critically, synthesize information and write about public relations course material rather than incorporate surface information into written assignments. Because peer reviewers can improve the grades on their final papers by offering concrete suggestions to the original authors, students…

Adding a strong conclusion can alter a cookbook lab into an inquiry lab by challenging the student to defend relevant data and clearly communicate his or her findings. A well-organized scoring guide makes it easier for students to understand what is involved in writing a strong conclusion. Examples of student writing that are accompanied with the…

The notion of "fluency" is most often associated with spoken-language phenomena such as stuttering. The present article investigates the relevance of considering fluency in writing. The basic argument for raising this question is empirical--it follows from a focus on difficulties in written and spoken language as manifestations of different…

The aim of this study was to compare the compositional performances of deaf and hearing students and to investigate the relationships between these performances and working memory capacities. Fifteen prelingually deaf, sign-using students and 15 hearing students composed a descriptive text and performed working memory tasks. The deaf students had…

The most ambitious project of many undergraduate business communication courses is the formal report. This assignment typically requires the use of many writing skills nurtured throughout the course. Skills such as proper style, tone, organization, flow, and mechanics are enhanced through the writing of memos and various types of letters. While…

More empirical studies are needed that evaluate interventions to improve the academic functioning of students with Asperger syndrome (AS). The purpose of this exploratory study was to evaluate the use of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) writing instruction (Graham, Harris, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1991) with an adolescent with AS. A…

A recent article in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" comparing perceptions of college preparedness in writing from the vantage point of high school teachers and college faculty shows that the two groups have dramatically different views. What accounts for these differences in perception? What types of writing assignments are high school…

The author, a high school teacher and forensics coach, describes ways to teach writing--including on-demand essays--that draw on successful practices she developed in coaching. Students learn the importance of using personal conviction and qualified thesis statements to build arguments, as well as learning "The Debater Four-Step," an effective…

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…

This study observes and examines how upper intermediate to advanced level college students perform and perceive one-topic-for-each student presentation as a means of learning English. It is also to have the prospective medical doctors ready for their future use of English presentation and paper writing since such demand is on the rise in the…

Many students have difficulty in educational and employment settings because they have failed to master basic writing skills. Multiple-baseline across-tasks designs were used to evaluate the effects of the Comprehensive Writing Program (CWP), a multicomponent intervention, on the writing performance of all students (n = 17) from 3 9th-grade…

Seniors submitted and revised essays within ePortfolios for evaluation by high school faculty and university first-year writing instructors. The project also examined differences between high school and college teachers' responses and effects on students' assumptions about the writing expected and valued in college. Results suggest techniques…

The National Research Council ([NRC], 2001) has stated that formative assessment is essential to fulfilling the mission of the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). This paper explores the relative utility of four different types of formative assessment prompts in eliciting middle school students' ideas about sinking and floating.…