In university settings, writing argumentative essays from reading conflicting source texts is a common task for students. In performing this synthesis task, they must deal with conflicting claims about a controversial issue as they develop their own positions. Argumentative synthesis is characterized by writers' back-and-forth moves between…

This study is the 10th in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study designed to examine the cognitive processes of college freshmen in the act of entering a university-level academic discourse community and to present a model of that transition. Subjects, 17 freshmen (of a total of 72 participating either as…

Reports a study, using sixth graders' introspective self-reports, to determine the context in which students use knowledge about narrative text structure, how they use this knowledge, and why they do not always employ this knowledge. (RAE)

This study is the eighth in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This report examines the initial reading strategies that a group of participating students used to begin a reading-to-write task and the impact of those…