Although the FCB (Foote, Cone, & Belding) grid was never intended to serve as an educational tool, it can be applied successfully in advertising classes to address the three areas that S. E. Moriarty considers to be the minimum for writing strategy. To demonstrate the superiority of the FCB grid as a pedagogical tool, a study analyzed…

One of the ways in which tutors can help students improve their academic writing is to give them positive and constructive feedback on their work. D. Hounsell, however, suggests that written comments may fail to connect because tutors' and students' perceptions of marking criteria can be very different. This paper reports on two research studies,…

A study examined the effectiveness of a metacognitive intervention that concentrated on eight subprocesses of writing and on executive procedures according to an "Orchestra Model" of text production. Subjects, 90 tenth-grade students, participated in the intervention which lasted for about six months and consisted of about 60 lessons.…

A collaborative, oral-history, writer's workshop was held in an undergraduate college reading class. Sixty-five students each taped an interview on literacy life-experiences with a self-described reluctant reader at the middle or high school level, and wrote a narrative based on the interview. Students worked together in groups on their…

One researcher found that the most productive collaborative learning approach has at its core a communally evolved metalanguage to generate and maintain ongoing dialogue among students and between students and their teacher. A shared metadiscourse about writing was established in the classroom by working in small groups to determine qualities of…

A study examined the writing experiences of three college students during their freshman and sophomore years to determine how students in a classroom setting determine the writing requirements of that discipline and for that teacher, and how they go about producing their writing assignments. The study used ethnographic observation and interviews,…

The progress of students enrolled in the writing center of a midwestern university was evaluted after one semester. Subjects were 35 students who had taken the first semester of a two-semester composition course and had failed to meet the guidelines for correctness established for the course. After writing a pretest essay, students were tutored…

The Oakland County School District in Michigan is in its fourth year of sponsoring the Oakland Writing Project. Research concerning whether the activities are having a positive influence on instruction and whether students are writing better as a result of the project has been, for the most part, informal but important. Project participants have…

A study examined the effectiveness of a writing center in improving student writing. All Composition 121 instructors except those who taught in the writing center were included. Students (1519 were enrolled in 69 sections of Composition 121) and instructors were randomly placed into three groups: Group I, the experimental group; Group II, the…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether proofreading a text aloud was more effective than silent proofreading in helping Black English Vernacular (BEV) speaking students to locate and correct dialect features in writing. The study was divided into two parts. In the first part, 29 11th grade BEV-speakers edited three teacher-produced…

Since 1975, an honors course in freshman composition has been offered at Emanuel County Junior College (ECJC), a unit of the University System of Georgia, for academically superior students whose needs may not be met by the standard curriculum. The process of identifying honors students involves screening entering students to identify those who…

A study explored how students of differing writing abilities (high, middle or low) approached a revising task that called for both editing (surface level changes) and revising (meaning level changes) and the effect that marking error location had on students' ability to detect and correct the two kinds of errors. Subjects, 12 seventh graders, were…

A study at Lansing, Michigan Community College investigated whether the current policy of grading the students according to the number of errors in their compositions was actually helping the students to make fewer errors in their writing. Error data were collected from 4 graded essays from each of 311 students in 2 writing courses (one on…

The Primary Trait System (PTS) of scoring was devised by the National Assessment of Educational Progress to score large numbers of natural writing samples. Essentially, PTS permits evaluation of writing in an objective way, but one that does not rely on scoring surface features such as mechanics, grammar, or spelling. While the assessment value of…

A study was designed to ascertain the effect writing centers and peer tutoring have on the attitudes of student writers. Subjects, 121 students enrolled in either basic writing or English composition courses at Davis and Elkins College, had their attitudes toward writing measured. Over the semester the attitudes, of both those that did (43) and…