This is a complete listing of abstracts of NCSWL Technical Reports and Occasional Papers. Because this list is long, you may prefer to browse the abstracts by topic or instructional level.
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TR 1. Research in Writing: Past, Present and Future, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Anne Haas Dyson, Linda Flower, and Wallace Chafe. This paper reviews the past twenty years of writing research in order to posit a social- cognitive theory of writing and the teaching and learning of writing. The authors provide a constructive rationale for the research mission of the Center for the Study of Writing. (Note: For an updated version of this literature review for a broader audience, see Occasional Paper No. 20.) August, 1987; 61 pages; $4.50.
TR 1-B. Critical Challenges for Research on Writing and Literacy: 1990-1995, by Anne Haas Dyson and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Dyson and Freedman discuss critical challenges for research on writing and literacy if educators are to meet the needs of the increasingly diverse populations that make up the United States. They selectively review the research that provides a basis for the mission and strategy of the National Center for the Study of Writing and, more specifically, for the Center's research projects. February, 1991; 40 pages; $4.00.
TR 1-C. Ten Years of Research: Achievements of the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Linda Flower, Glynda Hull, and J. R. Hayes. This report summarizes the contributions made to writing research over the past ten years by the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy. The report highlights Center research about writing, learning, instruction, and assessment in elementary and secondary schools, colleges, community centers, homes, and workplaces, with special attention to writing in multicultural and multilingual settings as well as teacher research. May 1995; 38 pages; $4.00.
TR 2. Unintentional Helping in the Primary Grades: Writing in the Children's World, by Anne Haas Dyson. Dyson explores children's classroom social lives, as revealed during journal time in a first/second grade class. Her analysis of peer social interactions shows such interactions to be key in contributing to and nurturing the skills and values associated with literacy. May, 1987; 29 pages; $4.00.
TR 3. A Good Girl Writes Like a Good Girl: Written Response and Clues to the Teaching/Learning Process, by Melanie Sperling and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Sperling and Freedman present a case study of a high-achieving student in a ninth-grade English class, exploring and analyzing sources of the student's misunderstanding of teacher-written response to her writing. They uncover a complexity of strategies that lie behind the misunderstanding, reflecting the information, skills, and values that teacher and student bring to the writing process. May, 1987; 18 pages; $3.50.
TR 4. Historical Overview: Groups in the Writing Classroom, by Anne DiPardo and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. DiPardo and Freedman review research on the use of peer groups in the classroom, focusing on peer response groups in the writing class. They discuss the role of groups in the collaborative process of language learning and suggest directions for future research on collaborative learning, particularly groups in writing classrooms. September, 1987; 17 pages; $3.50.
TR 5. Properties of Spoken and Written Language, by Wallace Chafe and Jane Danielewicz. Chafe and Danielewicz discuss important linguistic features that characterize different types of spoken and written language, from dinner conversations to academic papers. Taking into account the cognitive and social demands made on speakers, listeners, writers, and readers in their interactions, they analyze the reasons for these language differences. May, 1987; 27 pages; $4.00.
TR 6. The Role of Task Representation in Reading-to- Write, by Linda Flower (Reading-to-Write Report 2). In a study of college writers, Flower looks at the ways different writers interpret a "standard" writing task. In analyzing their reading and writing strategies, Flower demonstrates how students construct significantly different representations of a task, leading to differences in their texts and their writing process. June, 1987; 35 pages; $4.00.
TR 7. A Sisyphean Task: Historical Perspectives on the Relationship Between Writing and Reading Instruction, by Geraldine Joncich Clifford (a joint report with the Center for the Study of Reading). Using perspectives drawn from American educational and social history, Clifford identifies five historical forces and probes their interacting influence on English education: the democratization of schooling, the professionalization of educators, technological change, the functionalist or pragmatic character of American culture, and liberationist ideologies. September, 1987; 47 pages; $4.00.
TR 8. Writing and Reading in the Classroom, by James Britton (a joint report with the Center for the Study of Reading). Britton explores the classroom as an environment for literacy and literacy learning. He discusses ways in which teachers have developed strategies for encouraging children to learn to write-and-read--activities that have often been dissociated in classrooms but that together create a literacy learning environment. August, 1987; 25 pages; $4.00.
TR 9. Individual Differences in Beginning Composing: An Orchestral Vision of Learning to Write, by Anne Haas Dyson. Looking in depth at three first graders during classroom journal time, Dyson explores the interconnections of the children's speaking, writing, and drawing as indications of their developing acquisition of written language. Her analysis reveals the complexity of the writing acquisition process, as the three symbol systems interact in different ways for the different students. August, 1987; 28 pages; $4.00.
TR 10. Movement Into Word Reading and Spelling: How Spelling Contributes to Reading, by Linnea C. Ehri (a joint report with the Center for the Study of Reading). Drawing on studies of the role of spelling in the reading process, Ehri discusses ways in which spelling contributes to the development of reading and, conversely, how reading contributes to spelling development. The role of writing in reading and spelling development is also discussed. September, 1987; 15 pages; $3.50.
TR 11. Punctuation and the Prosody of Written Language, by Wallace Chafe. Prosody--rises and falls in pitch, accents, pauses, rhythms, variations in voice quality-- while a salient feature of spoken language, is not fully represented in written language. Reporting on a study of younger and older readers, Chafe explores the relationship between what he calls the covert prosody of writing and the principal device that writers use in order to make it at least partially overt, the devise of punctuation. October, 1987; 32 pages; $4.00.
TR 12. Peer Response Groups in Two Ninth-Grade Classrooms, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Freedman looks at peer response groups in two ninth-grade college preparatory classrooms. Her analysis of the students' face-to-face interactions reveals how students approach the substance and form of their writing, self- and other- evaluation, problem-solving, and audience awareness. October, 1987; 29 pages; $4.00.
TR 13. Writing and Reading: The Transactional Theory, by Louise M. Rosenblatt (a joint report with the Center for the Study of Reading). This report focuses on some epistemologically-based concepts relevant to the comparison of the reading and writing process which Rosenblatt believes merit fuller study and application in teaching and research. January, 1988; 20 pages; $3.50.
TR 14. National Surveys of Successful Teachers of Writing and Their Students: The United Kingdom and the United States, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman and Alex McLeod. For this study, Freedman and McLeod collected self-report survey data from successful elementary and secondary teachers of writing and from a sample of secondary students in the U.K. to parallel Freedman's 1987 U.S. survey data. Based on these surveys, this report compares the teaching and learning of writing in the two countries, focusing on what occurs inside classrooms as writing gets taught and learned. May, 1988; 49 pages; $4.00.
TR 15. Negotiating Among Multiple Worlds: The Space/Time Dimensions of Young Children's Composing, by Anne Haas Dyson. In this examination of the drawing, talking, and writing of kindergartners, first-, and second-graders, Dyson focuses on children's growing awareness of text time and space as they develop as authors of fictional prose. This study questions the developmental appropriateness of traditional assumptions about "embedded" and "disembedded" language and about "narrative" and "expository" prose. May, 1988; 36 pages; $4.00.
TR 16. How the Writing Context Shapes College Students' Strategies for Writing from Sources, by Jennie Nelson and John R. Hayes. This study explores processes college students use to write assigned research papers. It examines the skills and assumptions that freshmen and more advanced college students bring to the tasks of selecting paper topics, finding and selecting sources of information, and developing an organizing structure and thesis for their papers. August, 1988; 22 pages; $4.00.
TR 17. Written Rhetorical Syntheses: Processes and Products, by Margaret Kantz. Addressing the ways in which college students synthesize source material when they write research papers, Kantz presents case study analyses of the composing processes and written products of three undergraduates, supplemented by quantitative analyses of a group of seventeen undergraduate research papers. From this analysis, she offers a tentative model of a synthesizing process. January, 1989; 26 pages; $4.00.
TR 18. Readers as Writers Composing from Sources, by Nancy Nelson Spivey and James R. King. Extending research on writing processes as well as reading processes, this study examines the report-writing of sixth, eighth, and tenth graders, as accomplished and less accomplished readers work with source texts and compose their own new texts. Analyses reveal composing patterns connected not only to grade level but to reading ability as well. February, 1989; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 19. Rethinking Remediation: Toward a Social- Cognitive Understanding of Problematic Reading and Writing, by Glynda Hull and Mike Rose. This paper presents a case study of the writing produced by a community college student, considered "at risk" of not succeeding in school, for a basic reading and writing class. The authors reveal what writing strategies, habits, rules, and assumptions characterize the writing skills of this underprepared student and suggest a pedagogy to move such students toward more conventional discourse. May, 1989; 16 pages; $3.50.
TR 20.Forms of Writing and Rereading From Writing: A Preliminary Report, by Elizabeth Sulzby, June Barnhart, and Joyce Hieshima (a joint report with the Center for the Study of Reading). The authors report on a study of young children's use of five emergent forms of writing-- scribble, drawing, non-phonetic letter strings, phonetic or invented spelling, and conventional orthography. Describing developmental patterns of writing and rereading from writing found among kindergarten children, the authors discuss ways that children build a repertoire of useful linguistic tools using these five forms. July, 1989; 34 pages; $4.00.
TR 21. Studying Cognition in Context: Introduction to the Study, by Linda Flower (Reading-to-Write Report 1). Reading-to-write is an act of critical literacy central to much of academic discourse. This report introduces the Reading-to-Write project, which examined the cognitive processes of reading-to-write as they were embedded in the social context of a college course. Flower discusses the background to the project and provides an overview of the study design, which included an exploratory study (Technical Report 6) and a teaching study (Technical Reports 22-30). May, 1989; 42 pages; $4.00.
TR 22. Promises of Coherence, Weak Content, and Strong Organization: An Analysis of the Student Texts, by Margaret Kantz (Reading-to-Write Report 3). This report describes the ways that readers saw the structures in a set of freshman essays and discusses the problems the judges had in agreeing on how some students had interpreted the writing assignment. Analysis of students' organizing plans suggests that both students and teachers may sometimes confuse coherence strategies (for text) with knowledge transformation strategies (for content). May, 1989; 35 pages; $4.00.
TR 23. Students' Self-Analyses and Judges' Perceptions: Where Do They Agree? by John Ackerman (Reading-to-Write Report 4). This report summarizes student accounts of how they composed a first draft and then compares and contrasts how students and teachers evaluated the same essays. Students' self-analysis checklists showed a strong shift in perception for students in the experimental training condition, but a tellingly low agreement with judges' perceptions of the texts. May, 1989; 29 pages; $4.00.
TR 24. Exploring the Cognition of Reading-to-Write, by Victoria Stein (Reading-to-Write Report 5). This report describes how a comparison of the think-aloud protocols of 36 students showed differences in ways students monitored their comprehension, elaborated, structured the reading, and planned their texts. A study of these patterns of cognition and case studies of selected students revealed both some successful and some problematic strategies students brought to this reading-to-write task. May, 1989; 39 pages; $4.00.
TR 25. Elaboration: Using What You Know, by Victoria Stein (Reading-to-Write Report 6). This report provides a more in-depth look at one of the cognitive processes used in reading-to-write, namely elaboration. The process of elaboration allows students to use prior knowledge not only for comprehension and critical thinking, but also for structuring and planning their papers. However, this study found that much of this valuable thinking failed to be transferred into students' papers, although it had an important indirect influence. May, 1989; 24 pages; $4.00.
TR 26. The Effects of Prompts Upon Revision: A Glimpse of the Gap Between Planning and Performance, by Wayne C. Peck (Reading-to-Write Report 7). This report analyzes the think-aloud protocols and finished texts of students asked to revise a written assignment. Students introduced to task representation and prompted to "interpret for a purpose of one's own" on revision were far more likely to change their organizing plan than students prompted merely to revise to "make the text better." However, the protocols also revealed a significant group of "intenders" who made plans they were unable to translate into text. May, 1989; 26 pages; $4.00.
TR 27. Translating Context into Action, by John Ackerman (Reading-to-Write Report 8). Based on protocols, texts, and interviews, this report describes a set of "initial reading strategies" nearly every freshman used to begin the task--strategies that appear to reflect their training in summarization and recitation of information. From this limited and often unexamined starting point, students then had to construct a solution path which either clung to, modified, or rejected this a-rhetorical initial approach to reading and writing. May, 1989; 31 pages; $4.00.
TR 28. The Cultural Imperatives Underlying Cognitive Acts, by Kathleen McCormick (Reading-to-Write Report 9). By setting reading-to-write in a broad cultural context, this report explores some of the cultural imperatives that might underlie particular cognitive acts. Protocols and interviews suggest that three culturally-based attitudes played a role in this task: the desire for closure, a belief in objectivity, and a refusal to write about perceived contradictions. May, 1989; 37 pages; $4.00.
TR 29. Negotiating Academic Discourse, by Linda Flower (Reading-to-Write Report 10). Academic writing is both a cognitive and social process guided by strategic knowledge--the goals writers set based on their reading of the context, the strategies they invoke, and their awareness of both these processes. This report discusses the difficulties experienced by many college freshmen as they seek to negotiate the transition from a writing process based on comprehension and response to a more fully rhetorical, constructive process. May, 1989; 43 pages; $4.00.
TR 30.Expanding the Repertoire: An Anthology of Practical Approaches for the Teaching of Writing, edited by Kathleen McCormick (Reading-to-Write Report 11). This set of classroom approaches, written by teachers collaborating on a course that grew out of the Reading-to- Write project, helps students to explore their assumptions about their own reading and writing processes, become more aware of the cognitive and cultural implications of their choices, and find alternative approaches to the writing task. May, 1989; 77 pages; $5.50.
TR 31. Strategic Differences in Composing: Consequences for Learning Through Writing, by Ann M. Penrose. Exploring the assumption that writing is a way to learn, Penrose reports on a study of college freshman writers in which she identifies those features of the writing process that may influence learning. She discusses the relative effects of writing on different kinds of learning. May, 1989; 18 pages; $3.50.
TR 32. Foundations for Creativity in the Writing Process: Rhetorical Representations of Ill-defined Problems, by Linda J. Carey and Linda Flower. This paper examines the composing process of expert writers working in expository genres. Taking a problem-solving perspective, the authors address the concept of creativity in writing as it is embedded in ordinary cognitive processes. June, 1989; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 33. Social Context and Socially Constructed Texts: The Initiation of a Graduate Student into a Writing Research Community, by Carol Berkenkotter, Thomas N. Huckin, and John Ackerman. The authors explore academic and professional writing as it is shaped by social contexts. They examine a case-study doctoral student's writing development as, over time, he learns how to produce the type of academic prose valued by the professional community in which he is becoming a member. July, 1989; 22 pages; $4.00.
TR 34. Planning in Writing: The Cognition of a Constructive Process, by Linda Flower, Karen A. Schriver, Linda Carey, Christina Haas, and John R. Hayes (a joint report with the Carnegie Mellon Planning Project). This paper describes the process adult writers bring to ill-defined expository tasks, such as writing essays, articles, reports, and proposals. It presents a theory of constructive planning based on a detailed analysis of expert and novice writers and suggests goals for instruction and the support of planning. July, 1989; 55 pages; $4.50.
TR 35. Differences in Writers' Initial Task Representations, by Linda Carey, Linda Flower, John R. Hayes, Karen A. Schriver, and Christina Haas (a joint report with the Carnegie Mellon Planning Project). This exploratory study investigates how writers represent their task to themselves before beginning to write. Examining the writing plans of expert as well as student writers, it uncovers ways in which the type of planning writers do and the quality of their texts correlate. July, 1989; 28 pages; $4.00.
TR 36. "Once-upon-a-Time" Reconsidered: The Developmental Dialectic Between Function and Form, by Anne Haas Dyson. Based on a three-year study of writing development in an urban magnet school, this essay traces the evolution of "once-upon-a-time" in a case-study child's classroom story writing. Dyson demonstrates how the story forms young children learn from others are not the end products, but the catalysts, of development. July, 1989; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 37. I Want to Talk to Each of You: Collaboration and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference, by Melanie Sperling. Following ethnographic procedures, Sperling examines teacher-student writing conferences in a ninth- grade English class for six case-study students. Through discourse analysis and descriptive narrative, Sperling shows how collaboration between teacher and student encourages students' learning as writers. October, 1989; 56 pages; $4.50.
TR 38. Theory Building in Rhetoric and Composition: The Role of Empirical Scholarship, by Karen A. Schriver. This paper discusses the assumptions underlying empirical approaches to scholarship in rhetoric and composition. Shriver reviews recent criticisms of empirical scholarship and advocates a pluralism that focuses on how well particular perspectives or methods are used, rather than using some perspectives or methods to argue against others. January, 1990; 15 pages; $3.50.
>TR 39. Document Design from 1980 to 1990: Challenges that Remain, by Karen A. Schriver. Document design is the theory and practice of creating comprehensible, usable, and persuasive texts (oral or written, visual or verbal) for a particular audience in business, industry, government, or education. Schriver discusses the evolution of document design over the past decade, identifies challenges in integrating research with practice, and suggests a research agenda for document design in the 1990s. January, 1990; 31 pages; $4.00.
TR 40. Reading, Writing, and Knowing: The Role of Disciplinary Knowledge in Comprehension and Composing, by John M. Ackerman. To explore how experienced writers use both knowledge of a specific discipline and knowledge of general rhetorical skills, Ackerman analyses 40 synthesis essays written by graduate students in psychology and business. He finds that reading comprehension and composing processes are interrelated. March, 1990; 42 pages; $4.00.
TR 41. Evaluating Text Quality: The Continuum from Text-Focused to Reader-Focused Methods, by Karen A. Schriver. Noting that even experienced writers often need help in diagnosing text problems, Schriver discusses the strengths and limitations of three methods for evaluating text quality: (a) text-focused (including computer-based stylistic analysis programs), (b) expert-judgment-focused, and (c) reader-focused. She concludes that reader-focused approaches offer the best opportunity for detecting problems in a text. March, 1990; 36 pages; $4.00.
TR 42. The Word and the World: Reconceptualizing Written Language Development, or, Do Rainbows Mean a Lot to Little Girls? by Anne Haas Dyson. Arguing that current research has fragmented educators' vision of both written language and literacy development, Dyson offers a more integrated vision that preserves the integrity of written language as a symbol system, suggests five principles characterizing written language development that highlight the dialectical relationship between child construction and adult guidance, and discusses implications for early literacy instruction. April, 1990; 29 pages; $4.00.
TR 43. "This Was an Easy Assignment": Examining How Students Interpret Academic Writing Tasks, by Jennie Nelson. This study explores academic writing from the students' side of the desk, examining how thirteen college freshmen interpreted writing assignments in a variety of courses and how these interpretations differed from the intentions of the instructors making the assignments. October, 1990; 28 pages; $4.00.
TR 44. Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse, by Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano. This paper examines remediation as a social construct, as the product of assumptions, perceptions, and beliefs about literacy and learning. The authors illustrate some ways in which notions of learners as remedial, as deficient, can be created and played out in the classroom. They look closely at one college student and detail the interactional processes by which she is being defined as remedial. February, 1991; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 45. Effects of Controlled, Primerese Language on the Reading Process, by Paul Ammon, Herbert D. Simons, and Charles Elster. Millions of American children have received beginning reading instruction based on "controlled" texts in which words from a restricted vocabulary are used repeatedly in short sentences. To determine whether such "primerese" language makes learning to read easier or more difficult, the authors rewrote four primerese stories from basal readers to use more "natural" language. They then compared the effects of the original versus the rewritten texts on the reading process and reading comprehension of first graders. December, 1990; 22 pages; $4.00.
TR 46. Plain Language for Expert or Lay Audiences: Designing Text Using Protocol-Aided Revision, by Karen A. Schriver. This paper addresses both critics and proponents of the "plain language" movement, arguing for a redefinition of plain English and suggesting a method for assessing whether or not a text is indeed clear to its intended readership. Using two case studies, Schriver details the process of protocol-aided revision, which uses reader feedback to help writers to modify texts for expert or lay audiences. She also provides a cognitive model of the process of protocol-aided revision. February, 1991; 38 pages; $4.00.
TR 47. Transforming Texts: Constructive Processes in Reading and Writing, by Nancy Nelson Spivey. This paper focuses on the complex processes involved when writers compose from sources, processes in which writing influences reading and reading influences writing. Arguing that this "hybrid act of literacy" has been neglected in research, Spivey discusses ways writers organize, select, and connect content as they appropriate source materials and transform them in generating new texts. February, 1991; 24 pages; $4.00.
TR 48. Dialogues of Deliberation: Conversation in the Teacher-Student Writing Conference, by Melanie Sperling. Sperling focuses on three students in a ninth- grade English class--including a very quiet student and a very talkative one--as they converse with their teacher about their ongoing writing. Suggesting a broadened model of effective writing conference instruction, Sperling examines how such one-to-one conversations contribute to the processes of writing and learning to write for various students. May, 1991; 25 pages; $4.00.
TR 49. Visions of Children as Language Users: Research on Language and Language Education in Early Childhood, by Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi. In this report, Dyson and Genishi review recent research on oral and written language development in early childhood. They discuss how a vision of young children as active participants in a community has been reflected in and has helped shape research themes and current issues in language arts education. June, 1991; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 50.A Teacher-Research Group in Action, by Sandra R. Schecter and Rafael Ramirez. Based on a two-year study of a university-affiliated teacher-research group, Schecter and Ramirez address three concerns: (a) the kinds of support teachers need to conduct classroom research; (b) the effects of becoming researchers on teachers' views of classroom practice and of themselves as professionals; and (c) the kinds of knowledge teacher research can provide and the ways teachers present this knowledge in written texts. June, 1991; 14 pages; $3.50.
TR 51. Annotated Bibliography of Research on Writing in a Non-Native Language, by Sandra R. Schecter and Linda A. Harklau. It is estimated that over 35 million Americans do not speak English as their native language. In this annotated bibliography, Schecter and Harklau review more than 170 research studies on the needs of non-native speakers of English and their instruction in the area of writing. Subject areas include text features, non-native writing proficiency development, writing process, non- native writing and other language skills, and instructional factors. September, 1991; 66 pages; $5.00.
TR 52. Planning Text Together: The Role of Critical Reflection in Student Collaboration, by Lorraine Higgins, Linda Flower, and Joseph Petraglia. The authors argue that student collaboration does not necessarily foster critical reflection in writing tasks; use of reflection depends on students' assumptions about peer interaction and the task itself. Three forms of reflection were identified in college students' collaborative planning on a course paper: evaluating, considering alternatives, and justifying. While not all students engaged in reflective thinking, those who did were more likely to produce high-quality plans. September, 1991; 26 pages; $4.00.
TR 53. The Case of the Singing Scientist: A Performance Perspective on the "Stages" of School Literacy, by Anne Haas Dyson. This article offers a case study of a young African-American child in an urban K/1 classroom who used writing activities to perform, rather than simply to communicate. The child's assumptions about written language and texts conflicted in revealing ways with assumptions undergirding a "writing workshop" approach. The study examines the links between oral performance, literacy pedagogy, and the use of the explicit, analytic language valued in school. September, 1991; 34 pages; $4.00.
TR 54. Bilingual Minorities and Language Issues in Writing: Toward Profession-Wide Responses to a New Challenge, by Guadalupe Valdes. In this paper, Valdes presents an outline of issues fundamental to developing effective approaches for teaching writing to American bilingual minority students. She criticizes existing compartmentalization within the composition profession, identifies different types of bilingual individuals, reviews trends in current scholarship in second-language writing, and discusses a number of research directions in which the involvement of mainstream scholars would be most valuable. October, 1991; 38 pages; $4.00.
TR 55. Writing from Sources: Authority in Text and Task, by Stuart Greene. In this study, fifteen undergraduates in a European history seminar were asked to write either a report or a problem-based essay, integrating prior knowledge with information from six textual sources. Analyses of the student essays as well as think-aloud protocols and reading-writing logs revealed that the groups differed significantly in their interpretations of the two tasks and in their approaches to restructuring textual information; students writing problem-based essays included significantly more content units in their essays than students writing reports. October, 1991; 32 pages; $4.00.
TR 56. Collaboration and the Construction of Meaning, by Linda Flower and Lorraine Higgins. This study explores the constructive and collaborative process of a group of college freshmen in a writing course. Flower and Higgins discuss the theoretical roots of collaborative planning, look at students' planning as acts of construction and negotiation, and raise questions about the role students' strategic knowledge plays in this social/cognitive process. December, 1991; 74 pages; $5.50.
TR 57. Technological Indeterminacy: The Role of Classroom Writing Practices in Shaping Computer Use, by Cynthia Greenleaf. This study examines the integration of computers into a remedial high school English class. Greenleaf focuses on writing practices before and after computers were introduced, and concludes that the teacher's structuring of writing instruction had the greatest impact on student writing and the ways computers entered into writing. She argues that computers do not function as independent variables in classrooms, but rather as part of a complex network of social and pedagogical interactions. Winner of NCTE's Promising Researcher Award. January, 1992; 40 pages; $4.00.
TR 58. Composition in the Context of CAP: A Case Study of the Interplay Between Assessment and School Life, by Peggy Trump Loofbourrow. This study examines the impact of a large-scale writing assessment, the California Assessment Program (CAP), on the life of one junior high school, analyzing how teachers and administrators at the school prepared students for the eighth-grade assessment. Loofbourrow finds that teachers' interpretations of the assessment, influenced by their own education, experience, and teaching philosophy, result in significant differences in writing instruction in individual classrooms. Winner of NCTE's Promising Researcher Award. January, 1992; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 59. Constructing a Research Paper: A Study of Students' Goals and Approaches, by Jennie Nelson. This study considers the processes involved in writing an academic research paper. Nelson studied twenty-one college freshmen enrolled in an introductory cognitive psychology class to determine how students understood the teacher's research paper assignments, whether students took extensive notes and produced multiple drafts, and whether these "high-investment" reading and writing processes led to higher-quality papers. February, 1992; 16 pages; $3.50.
TR 60.Collaboration Between Children Learning to Write: Can Novices be Masters? by Colette Daiute and Bridget Dalton. Daiute and Dalton explore the role of peer collaboration in literacy development as a case study in the broader inquiry on the social nature of learning and cognitive development. They analyze individual and collaborative stories produced by low-achieving urban third-graders on a computer, as well as transcripts of the talk between collaborative pairs, to illustrate that children can learn and use complex story elements by working with their peers. April, 1992; 54 pages; $4.50.
TR 61. The Development of Writing Abilities in a Foreign Language: Contributions Toward a General Theory of L2 Writing, by Guadalupe Valdes, Paz Haro, and Maria Paz Echevarriarza. This paper contributes to a theory of foreign language writing by examining current assumptions about the development of writing skills in a foreign language embedded in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. The authors test these assumptions by analyzing writing produced by university students studying Spanish at three levels of proficiency. April, 1992; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 62. Nested Contexts: A Basic Writing Adjunct Program and the Challenge of "Educational Equity," by Anne DiPardo. This study examines one university's efforts to promote the academic success of underrepresented minority students through a basic writing adjunct program. DiPardo considers interactions between selected small-group leaders and their students in light of the wider departmental and campus-wide contexts and the tensions and controversies surrounding the university's efforts to promote "educational equity." May, 1992; 50 pages; $4.50.
TR 63. "Whistle for Willie," Lost Puppies, and Cartoon Dogs: The Sociocultural Dimensions of Young Children's Composing, or, Toward Unmelting Pedagogical Pots, by Anne Haas Dyson. Drawing on data from an urban elementary school, Dyson suggests ways that the "process" approach to teaching writing, in spite of many positive features, may be too rigidly implemented to allow for the needs of young writers in multicultural classrooms. She argues that teachers need to be sensitive to social and cultural diversity and respond with a greater variety of textual models and writing activities in their classrooms. June, 1992; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 64. Ideological Divergences in a Teacher Research Group, by Sandra R. Schecter and Shawn Parkhurst. Schecter and Parkhurst focus on the differing ideologies of research, teaching/learning, and writing held and developed by members of a teacher research group. In analyzing the ideological positions that developed within the group, and the conflicts and interchanges among participants, the authors show that there exist important divisions within the teacher research movement that are intellectually creative and socially important. October, 1992; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 65. Student Portfolios and Teacher Logs: Blueprint for a Revolution in Assessment, by Robert C. Calfee and Pam Perfumo. This report reviews the concept of alternative assessment in a specific situation: teacher assessment of student achievement in the language arts in the elementary grades. Calfee and Perfumo first present preliminary findings from a survey of portfolio practice in selected elementary programs throughout the United States. They then present a new concept, the Teacher Logbook, designed to support and effectuate the portfolio approach, and to connect portfolios to other facets of teacher professionalization. April, 1993; 12 pages; $3.50.
TR 66. Linking Classroom Discourse and Classroom Content: Following the Trail of Intellectual Work in a Writing Lesson, by Cynthia Greenleaf and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. This paper presents an approach to analyzing classroom talk that sheds light on the intellectual work of the classroom. The authors analyze a whole-class interaction in a ninth-grade English classroom. The analysis reveals the underlying intellectual structure of the interaction, including the teacher's pedagogical goals, the cognitive skills required for successful student participation in the activity, and the strategies students apply to the task. September, 1993; 42 pages; $4.00.
TR 67. From Invention to Social Action in Early Childhood Literacy: A Reconceptualization through Dialogue about Difference, by Anne Haas Dyson. Drawing on a recent ethnographic study of child composing in an urban primary school, Dyson contrasts dominant assumptions about appropriate developmental practices (i.e., invented spelling, process writing) with children's interpretations of those practices, interpretations grounded in children's social and cultural worlds. She argues that infusing situatedness and culture into the ways in which educators observe and make sense of children's written language should make "normal" a range of possible pathways to literacy--and "appropriate" a range of ways of teaching. September, 1993; 17 pages; $3.50.
TR 68. Crossing the Bridge to Practice: Rethinking the Theories of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Freedman argues that Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's theories of social interaction are so general that they are not always useful guides for classroom practice. A comparison of secondary school classrooms in Great Britain and the United States reveals that when teachers apply similar theories to everyday practice, important pedagogical contrasts remain--both in terms of the ways instruction is organized and in terms of what students produce. May, 1994; 16 pages; $3.50.
TR 69. Implications of Cognitive Psychology for Authentic Assessment and Instruction, by Robert Calfee. Calfee offers a brief sketch of developments in the psychology of learning and thinking over the past half century, provides a few thoughts about the forks in the road that now confront U.S. educators (continuing a tradition of "managed" schooling versus a radical transformation in the teaching profession), focuses on testing and assessment (probably the point of greatest tension at present), and describes an assessment model that relies on teacher judgments for both internal and external accountability. May, 1994; 22 pages; $4.00.
TR 70.The Ninjas, the X-Men, and the Ladies: Playing with Power and Identity in an Urban Primary School, by Anne Haas Dyson. Based on a qualitative study of writing in an urban second grade classroom, Dyson analyzes children's symbolic and social use of superhero stories-- popular media stories that vividly reveal societal beliefs about power and gender, which are themselves interwoven in complex ways with race, class, and physical demeanor. Through the writing and acting of their stories, the children raised issues about who plays whom in whose story. The dialogic processes thus enacted allowed rigid images of gender relations and of glorified power to be rendered more complex. August, 1994; 20 pages; $3.50.
TR 71. Writing Children: Reinventing the Development of Childhood Literacy, by Anne Haas Dyson. Adult ways of writing about children have traditionally taken for granted the social and ideological worlds of privileged adults. In this essay, Dyson aims to make problematic such writing by reviewing new visions of language and of development that acknowledge human sociocultural and ideological complexity. To more fully explore these new visions, this essay also offers a concrete illustration of writing children as social and ideologically complex beings. It concludes by considering implications for both professional writing and classroom pedagogy. April 1995; 38 pages; $4.00.
TR 72. Nerds, Normal People, and Homeboys: Asian American Students and the Language of School Success, by Stanford T. Goto. This study is an attempt to complicate current explanations of Asian American success in school. Using ethnographic methods, Goto examines how a group of high- achieving Chinese American high school freshmen perceive themselves as learners and group members, and how these perceptions relate to existing research on Asian American success. He argues that their behavior in school is directly influenced by their perceptions of Asian and non-Asian peers; their awareness of family expectations and status mobility are related but less direct influences. Winner of NCTE's Promising Researcher Award. June 1995; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 73. Children Out of Bounds: The Power of Case Studies in Expanding Visions of Literacy Development, by Anne Haas Dyson. In this paper, Dyson argues for the value of case studies in contributing to a developing understanding of how children learn to write. Drawing on fifteen years of case study research, Dyson reviews the cases of three of her focal students, Rachel, Jake, and Tina, and uses them to illustrate the varied ways each case pushes the boundaries of theoretical understandings. She concludes that case studies provide contextual complexities and a depth of detail unavailable through other research methodologies, but cautions against prescribing simplistic teaching "methods" based solely upon case study findings. June 1995; 34 pages; $4.00.
OP 1. Interpretive Acts: Cognition and the Construction of Discourse, by Linda Flower. This paper discusses the cognitive processes which make reading and writing constructive (and intentional) acts. Flower elucidates a cognitive framework for understanding the acts of reading and writing, contrasting it with other familiar frameworks from other disciplines. September, 1987; 18 pages; $3.50.
OP 2. What Good is Punctuation? by Wallace Chafe. Based on Chafe's study of punctuation and the prosody of written language, this paper discusses ways that punctuation reflects both a reader's and writer's "internal voice." The paper offers insights for teachers and learners about the assumptions that lie behind the use of punctuation in writing. November, 1987; 6 pages; $3.50.
OP 3. Drawing, Talking and Writing: Rethinking Writing Development, by Anne Haas Dyson. Based on Dyson's studies of primary grade children engaged in journal writing, this paper discusses how children move among and negotiate multiple worlds: the text world they create on paper; the social world that they share with their peers; and the wider experienced world of people, places, events and things. Children's texts thus become increasingly embedded in their lives. February, 1988; 26 pages; $4.00.
OP 4. The Construction of Purpose in Writing and Reading, by Linda Flower. Based on a decade of studies of the cognitive processes student and expert writers reveal while composing text, this paper discusses two interrelated concerns: how writers come by/find/create their sense of purpose, and whether readers are aware of or are affected by writers' purposeful text construction. July, 1988; 21 pages; $4.00.
OP 5. Writing and Reading Working Together, by Robert J. Tierney, Rebekah Caplan, Linnea Ehri, Mary K. Healy, and Mary Hurdlow (from a joint project with the Center for the Study of Reading). Drawing on their teaching experience and research perspectives, the authors discuss specific classroom practices in which writing and reading work together. They focus on students' social and personal growth, growth in their learning, development of their critical reading, and improvements in their writing and reading skills as a result of these practices. August, 1988; 37 pages; $4.00.
OP 6. Narrative Knowers, Expository Knowledge: Discourse as Dialectic, by Anne DiPardo. DiPardo explores the schism between narrative and exposition and argues that instruction which fosters a "grand leap" away from narrative into the presumably more grown-up world of expository prose denies students the development of a complex way of knowing and seeing, robbing them of critical developmental experience with language. January, 1989; 34 pages; $4.00.
OP 7. The Problem-Solving Processes of Writers and Readers, by Ann S. Rosebery, Linda Flower, Beth Warren, Betsy Bowen, Bertram C. Bruce, Margaret Kantz, and Ann M. Penrose (from a joint project with the Center for the Study of Reading). The authors focus on writing and reading as forms of problem-solving that are shaped by communicative purpose. They examine the kinds of problems that arise as writers and readers attempt to communicate with one another--as writers and readers try to write to a specific audience, for example, or as readers try to interpret an author's meaning--and the strategies they draw upon to resolve those problems. January, 1989; 30 pages; $4.00.
OP 8. Writing and Reading in the Community, by Robert Gundlach, Marcia Farr, and Jenny Cook-Gumperz (from a joint project with the Center for the Study of Reading). This paper reviews recent scholarship on writing and reading outside of school--that is, in the community, both at home and in the workplace. Gundlach, Farr, and Cook- Gumperz explore writing and reading as social practices and consider the implications of this social view of literacy outside of school for writing and reading instruction in school. March, 1989; 41 pages; $4.00.
OP 9. Bridges: From Personal Writing to the Formal Essay, by James Moffett. Moffett discusses the transition from writing personal-experience themes to writing formal essays. As a framework for understanding this transition, he presents a schema that groups different writing types and shows their connections. As illustration, he includes examples of student writing from his anthology series Active Voices. March, 1989; 19 pages; $3.50.
OP 10.Contextual Complexities: Written Language Policies for Bilingual Programs, by Carole Edelsky and Sarah Hudelson. Because learning to write always happens in multiple and complex contexts, Edelsky and Hudelson argue for governmental policies for bilingual education that are broad and non-specific, linked to general goals, with local policies developed locally as the local situation dictates. June, 1989; 16 pages; $3.50.
OP 11. Cognition, Context, and Theory-Building, by Linda Flower. In this paper, Flower addresses the debate in composition studies over whether individual cognition or social and cultural context provides the motive force for the writing process. Flower posits the need for a more integrated theoretical vision to explain the interaction between context and cognition. She discusses ways educators might build an interactive vision and how such a vision might improve writing instruction. May, 1989; 27 pages; $4.00.
OP 12. Construing Constructivism: Reading Research in the United States, by Nancy Nelson Spivey. Constructivism portrays the reader as building a mental representation from textual cues by organizing, selecting, and connecting content. This paper reviews research on these aspects of reading and assesses the impact of constructivism on four reading-related issues in the United States: readability of texts, assessment of reading ability, instruction in reading, and conception of literacy. June, 1989; 24 pages; $4.00.
OP 13. Must Teachers Also Be Writers? by Vivian Gussin Paley. In this paper, Paley provides examples of her classroom experiences with kindergartners, showing how keeping a daily journal helps her to understand her students, their learning, and her own teaching. Says Paley: "Only as we write down our thoughts and observations may we question and argue with ourselves about the things we do and say." September, 1989; 17 pages; $3.50.
OP 14. Shirley and the Battle of Agincourt: Why It Is So Hard for Students to Write Persuasive Researched Analyses, by Margaret Kantz. Using a fictional college sophomore called Shirley and her essay on the Battle of Agincourt, Kantz connects recent research on expository writing with a discussion of common student problems in writing a term paper. Kantz describes rhetorical strategies students can learn that will make their essays more interesting. November, 1989; 25 pages; $4.00.
OP 15. A Whole Language Approach to the Teaching of Bilingual Learners, by Alex Moore. This paper relates the experiences of two London teachers and a fifteen-year- old immigrant Bangladeshi student as they work together on drafts of the student's autobiography, illustrating how a sensitive teaching style can contribute to the development of writing skills in students whose first language is not English. January, 1990; 18 pages; $3.50.
OP 16. Using Student Writing to Assess and Promote Understandings in Science, by Paul Ammon and Mary Sue Ammon. Using examples of writing from elementary and high school students, this paper suggests that writing assignments can be a particularly rich source of information for science teachers who wish to take their students' present understandings into account as they plan and carry out instruction. January, 1990; 6 pages; $3.50.
OP 17. Toward a Dialectical Theory of Composing, by Stuart Greene. Greene reviews recent social theories of knowledge in composition studies and criticizes the neglect of individual cognition--of how individuals reflect, form judgments, make choices, and construct meaning. He calls for a dialectical cognitive-social epistemic that acknowledges both social and ideological forces as well as cognitive processes in explaining how students learn to write in their chosen disciplines. January, 1990; 19 pages; $3.50.
OP 18. Cognitive Processes in Creativity, by John R. Hayes. Hayes discusses characteristics of creative people and cognitive processes involved in creative acts. He argues that differences in people's ability to define problems or to recognize opportunities for creative solutions have their origin not in innate cognitive abilities but rather in the motivation and hard work of the creative person. January, 1990; 15 pages; $3.50.
OP 19. Weaving Possibilities: Rethinking Metaphors for Early Literacy Development, by Anne Haas Dyson. Dyson offers critical reflections on current ways of thinking about literacy teaching and learning, arguing that we must attend not only to the vertical "scaffolding" of young children's efforts but also to the horizontal "weaving" of their diverse intentions and resources. To clarify both the limits of scaffolding and the complementary possibilities of weaving, Dyson offers a closer look at the classroom experiences of two case-study kindergartners. July, 1990; 19 pages; $3.50.
OP 20.On Teaching Writing: A Review of the Literature, by Anne Haas Dyson and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. The teaching of writing is a complex act, both because of the complex nature of writing itself and because of the nature of classrooms as educational settings. In this paper, Dyson and Freedman review the kinds of interrelated research knowledge about writing that may help focus teacher observations, deepen insights, and inform the crucial decisions teachers make about how best to support their students' efforts. (Note: For a more complete and technical version of this literature review, see Technical Report No. 1.) July, 1990; 44 pages; $4.00.
OP 21. Redefining Revision for Freshmen, by David L. Wallace and John R. Hayes. This study investigates the impact of explicit instructions on the revising strategies of college freshmen. Wallace and Hayes find that students instructed to revise globally produce better revisions than students simply asked to revise. They were able to produce a significant increase in global revision and in revision quality with just eight minutes of instruction, which allowed students to access revision skills they already possessed. July, 1990; 10 pages; $3.50.
OP 22. "This Wooden Shack Place": The Logic of an Unconventional Reading, by Glynda Hull and Mike Rose. Hull and Rose analyze an interaction between Rose and a student in a remedial college composition class, where the student's personal history and cultural background shape an unconventional reading of a poem used in a writing assignment. They discuss the logic of the student's interpretation of the poem, showing the value of conversing with students about interpretations that initially strike the teacher as "a little off the mark." December, 1990; 10 pages; $3.50.
OP 23. Changing Views of Language in Education and the Implications for Literacy Research: An Interactional Sociological Perspective, by Jenny Cook-Gumperz and John J. Gumperz. This paper discusses the ways in which language has entered into studies in education over the past three decades. The authors suggest that an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, where language in the classroom is seen not just as an abstract grammatical and semantic system but as a process of verbal communication that includes culture-bound and contextual knowledge, has a special usefulness for literacy research. December, 1990; 22 pages; $4.00.
OP 24. Language Minority Education in Great Britain: A Challenge to Current U.S. Policy, by Sandra Lee McKay and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. McKay and Freedman compare British and U.S. policies for educating language minority students and show how these policies reflect different assumptions about language development and different definitions of equal opportunity. They suggest ways the British decision to place language minority students in "mainstreamed" classrooms, where language specialists work side-by-side with the classroom teacher, challenges the U.S. policy of separate programs for nonnative speakers. January, 1991; 16 pages; $3.50.
OP 25. Peeking Out from Under the Blinders: Some Factors We Shouldn't Forget in Studying Writing, by John R. Hayes. This essay is written for researchers and educators as a reminder of the broad range of factors that have a crucial impact on how writers write. To combat a narrowing of focus as writing researchers become preoccupied with more specialized research interests, Hayes proposes a checklist of six diverse factors that have been shown to have an important impact on writing performance. February, 1991; 16 pages; $3.50.
OP 26. High School English and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference: Fine-Tuned Duets in the Ensemble of the Classroom, by Melanie Sperling. Sperling provides a glimpse into an urban ninth-grade English classroom and examines some of the teacher-student conferences that take place there. She shows that even if a secondary school teacher lacks time for lengthy one-to-one interactions, the teacher's brief conversations with individual students can play an important role in writing instruction. May, 1991; 10 pages; $3.50.
>OP 27. Evaluating Writing: Linking Large-Scale Testing and Classroom Assessment, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Freedman focuses on two currently distinct kinds of writing evaluation: large-scale testing at the national, state, district, or school level; and classroom assessment by teachers looking at the writing of their own students. To help bridge the wide gap between teachers of writing and the testing and measurement community, Freedman describes several portfolio assessment programs that offer potential models for ways to strengthen both large-scale evaluation and classroom instruction. May, 1991; 20 pages; $3.50.
OP 28. A Social Perspective on Informal Assessment: Voices, Texts, Pictures, and Play from a First Grade, by Sarah Merritt and Anne Haas Dyson. This paper focuses on a first grade classroom in a multi-ethnic urban school and discusses the ways in which Merritt, as the classroom teacher, informally assesses the progress of her students. Merritt and Dyson show how a teacher, like an archaeologist gathering artifacts, can use the materials produced in a classroom's social community to search for clues that make clear how and what children are learning and how teachers might best support that learning. September, 1991; 24 pages; $4.00.
OP 29. Mining Texts in Reading to Write, by Stuart Greene. In this paper, Greene proposes a set of strategies for connecting reading and writing, discussing ways writers read and select information from source texts when they have a sense of authorship. In order to make clear how authorship affects reading, Greene explores three key "excavation" strategies students employ for what he terms "mining" a text--reconstructing context, inferring or imposing structure, and seeing choices in language. October, 1991; 18 pages; $3.50.
OP 30.Untracking Advanced Placement English: Creating Opportunity is Not Enough, by Joan Kernan Cone. In this paper, Cone describes what happened when she opened up her Advanced Placement English class at an urban high school to any students who were willing to commit to a rigorous regimen of reading and writing. She discusses the changes she made in her teaching strategies in order to make success possible for all of her students, many of whom had never been in an advanced English class before. April, 1992; 10 pages; $3.50.
OP 31. Writing Matters, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman and Fred Hechinger. This paper, written in non-technical language for a general audience, outlines and synthesizes the Center's research findings and the implications of these findings for teachers, parents, students, and policy-makers. Freedman and Hechinger begin by discussing new findings related to the early years of schooling, moving from there to a focus on the later years, considering important issues such as the controversies surrounding writing assessment, the professionalization of teaching, and the challenges of educating students who do not speak English as their first language. June, 1992; 10 pages; $3.50.
OP 32. From Prop to Mediator: The Changing Role of Written Language in Children's Symbolic Repertoires, by Anne Haas Dyson. Using illustrations from an ongoing study of literacy development among African-American children in an urban school, Dyson examines how children's use of written language changes during the early childhood years. She argues that there is no linear progression in written language development; rather, written language emerges most strongly when it is embedded within a child's total symbolic repertoires, including drawing, playing, singing, dancing, and storytelling. Further, she cautions against the uncritical use of writing process pedagogy with young children. September, 1992; 22 pages; $4.00.
OP 33-B. Video Resources for the Teaching of Literacy: An Annotated Bibliography, by James E. Lobdell and Sandra R. Schecter. Lobdell and Schecter review available video resources in literacy education, with an emphasis on videos which feature teachers and learners in action. For each entry, they indicate audiences for which the video may hold special appeal and specific topic or problem areas about which the video may prove insightful. October, 1995; 32 pages; $4.00.
OP 34. Community Literacy, by Wayne Campbell Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. This paper articulates a vision of community literacy that can serve as a source of renewal for urban communities. Based on the experiences of the Community Literacy Center on Pittsburgh's North Side, the authors examine the social and historical context of urban settlement houses, discuss how the concept of community literacy is positioned within other established theories of literacy as they relate to community building, and examine a set of guiding principles that have emerged after five years of reflecting on community literacy in practice. January, 1994; 40 pages; $4.00.
OP 35. Confronting the Split between "The Child" and Children: Toward New Curricular Visions of the Child Writer, by Anne Haas Dyson. Dyson uses everyday school experiences with children to reconstruct our image of "the child." She considers dominant ways in which educators have constructed the concept of "the child writer," and illustrates one way of reconceiving that child. In the process, she suggests that rethinking dominant images might help teachers better meet current curricular challenges, especially the need to envision the child in ways that reflect belief in the diversity of children with whom teachers work. May, 1994; 20 pages; $3.50.
OP 36. Moving Writing Research into the 21st Century, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Freedman argues that writing research in the 21st century will benefit by being inclusive--of a diverse population of learners, taught by a diverse population of teachers, using approaches that allow for a diversity of ways of learning--with new knowledge gathered from diverse sources and with diverse methods. Using her own research on learning to write in inner-city schools in the U.S. and Great Britain, Freedman shows how specific research on the learning of diverse populations pushes educators to elaborate existing theories. Finally, she explains the influence of such theory-building on her continuing research on inner-city secondary students in the U.S. May, 1994; 14 pages; $3.50.
OP 37. What's Involved?: Setting up a Writing Exchange, --> by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. This paper describes a writing exchange pairing classes in the San Francisco Bay Area, grades six through nine, with classes in inner-city London. Through these writing exchanges pairs of teachers on both sides of the Atlantic worked to get students seriously involved in using written language, especially students with long histories of school failure. Freedman shows how writing substantial pieces for a distant but real whole-class audience helped students to care about their writing and make significant strides as writers. June, 1994; 26 pages; $4.00.
OP 38. School Reform through Examinations: Lessons from the British Experience, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Recent calls for national achievement examinations for American students appear to be modeled on the British examination system. In this paper, Freedman considers the effects of the British examination system on what and how students learn in one area of the curriculum, English language and literature. She presents evidence that suggests that a system of high-stakes examinations, even well-designed performance-based examinations, presents a flawed foundation on which to build an educational reform movement. She further argues that a stronger foundation for educational reform will likely come through working with teachers and school administrators to rethink and reshape the curriculum as well as the organization of the school, with testing following from, not leading the reform effort. June, 1994; 12 pages; $3.50.
OP 39. Ahead to the Past: Assessing Student Achievement in Writing, by Robert C. Calfee. This paper, written in non-technical language for a general audience, outlines recent developments in the area of assessment. Calfee provides a brief history of assessment methods, including the development of standardized achievement tests and the evolution of alternative forms of assessment such as writing portfolios. He then summarizes a Center survey of portfolio practices in classrooms across the nation, demonstrating how portfolios are understood and interpreted in a variety of ways. He then discusses the role of students and parents in alternative assessment and concludes with observations about where the portfolio movement is headed. August, 1994; 10 pages; $3.50.
OP 40.Revealing the Teacher-as-Reader: A Framework for Discussion and Learning, by Melanie Sperling. Based on detailed observations of an eleventh-grade English teacher's responses to her students' writing, Sperling offers a framework for thinking about the perspective teachers bring to reading students' writing. In her framework, Sperling identifies five key ways that this teacher reader oriented herself to her student writers and their writing, and suggests that other teachers in other settings can put the observations derived from this case to the test of their own classroom experiences. March, 1995; 12 pages; $3.50.
OP 41. ... And Justice for All, by Griselle M. Diaz-Gemmati. In this essay, Diaz-Gemmati, an eighth grade English teacher and a teacher researcher affiliated with the Center's M-CLASS project, writes about the surprising friction and division that occurred when her students began to explore themes of racism and prejudice through literature and writing. Although the students were from diverse racial heritages, they had always gotten along well until the their diverse views of racism became an explicit part of classroom life. Diaz-Gemmati describes the process by which her students were able to work through their differences and come to a new understanding of one another. June 1995; 24 pages; $4.00.
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