Topic: Research Abstracts

10-second reviews: National Writing Project, free writing, unfamiliar forms of writing, writing collaboratively.

Abstracts: 

Assessing a National Writing Project summer session: helped teachers become comfortable in writing process instruction. But finds that the teachers were less successful in developing criteria for judging student writing and teaching revision. S Bratcher and EJ Struble, 1994, 142. ………. Finds that although engaging in free writing decreased college students’ apprehension about writing…it id not result in general improvement in writing. ME Sorenson, 1994, 430. ………. Examines the impact on a sampling of college students and composition instructors of five procedures for teaching an unfamiliar form of writing: just describing the form; giving only a model of the form; giving a description and a model; giving a model and an explanation of how it suits the description; and giving a description, a model and an explication. Finds the last procedure was associated with most successful learning of the form…. EA Stolarek, 1994, 430. ………. Examines the efforts of four pairs of faculty colleagues to collaborate on scholarly papers. Considers the question of “authority” within groups, differences in collaborators’ views of research, differences in preferred research methods, and differences in their ways of drafting text. RE Burnett and HR Ewald, 1994, p. 431.

Source: “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English.” Research in the Teaching of English (December 1994), 418-436.