Proposes that a systematic program of summary writing may be particularly effective tool for helping students overcome egocentrism by requiring them to focus objectively on someone else's ideas. Describes a program of summary assignments that foster dialectic thinking. (HTH)

This collection of materials, a summary of a workshop, is in four parts. The first part lists participants in the workshop and their addresses. The second part presents a recorder's summary of statements made by six participants in a panel presentation on "What Is the Domain Beyond?" The third section gives brief accounts of three…

The role of autonomic arousal in feeling states has long been of interest to psychologists. To examine the necessity of arousal for an effective mood induction, 60 college students were instructed either to exercise vigorously (high arousal group), exercise lightly with a rest period (low arousal group), or complete a questionnaire (no arousal…

Describes writing assignments that help students make the transition from concrete to formal operations. The assignments confront the writers with an idea or piece of experience, ask them to respond to it and how they arrived at this response, and what other responses could be made by them or by someone else. (HTH)

Discusses situational sequencing, a concept of teaching writing that places writers within specific rhetorical contexts and asks them to produce a series of writings that develop from and relate to one another. Provides examples of such assignments. (FL)

By engaging in philosophical discussion in their writing, freshman composition students can discover that writing is a mediating tool between the self and the objective world, a means to examine the nature of reality and their thinking processes. Introducing philosophical issues opens the door for the investigation of difficult and abstract topics…

Describes how two objectives--enhancing public relations thinking and producing an attractive showpiece of writing talent for the student--form the basis of a course in public relations at the University of Florida. (HOD)

Explains the microthemes technique, which involves students responding to assignments chosen to emphasize various forms of writing and thinking with written products no larger than 5 x 8 inch note cards. Reviews four types of microthemes used at Montana State University, explaining the activity and the writing and thinking skills developed. (DMM)

To do academic work, basic writers must know how to use the forms that express mature thinking. Accustomed to the demands of speech, basic writers often rely on unspecified context to relate ideas, thus failing to establish the connections evident in well-developed thought. While able to use certain cohesive ties such as repetitions,…

Argues that paragraph form congruent with the patterns and habits of thinking develops from the writer's sensitivity to the impact of visual images on the reader's mind. (MM)

This collection of materials, a summary of a workshop, is divided into five sections, framed by introductory and concluding remarks. The sections are: (1) a panel on "What Is the Domain Beyond?"--panelists discussed their particular interests in areas that could not be traditionally classified as "cognitive" and related those…

To demonstrate how discourse tasks can differ in their cognitive difficulties, students in a graduate course on the teaching of writing participated in a procedure called "invisible writing." The purpose was to show the students that as they took on more cognitively demanding writing tasks, their ability to produce coherent discourse…

Describes an assignment to focus students' attention on the thinking process in which students write dialogues that reproduce concretely the dialectic movement of a formal argument. Includes a more advanced exercise in which students' address the remarks of literary critics. (HTH)

Students write a great deal during their school years, but they apparently never realize that writing affects their lives outside of school and can often even be important to their success. Research on the composing process has enabled teachers to separate the writing process from its product, but theory, practice, and research still focus on the…

Questions raised by the misinterpretations evidenced in the final examination essays of a freshman English class should lead teachers to a new understanding of how the phrasing of writing assignments influences what students write. Some of the questions included: (1) How detailed must an assignment be to communicate its goals? (2) What type of…