This annotated bibliography is intended to help teachers of composition improve writing quality of entering college students. The main body of the report is preceded by a brief summary of sources for faculty interested in examining the causes attributed to the decline in college students' writing skills, including: "National Assessment and the…

Describes the methods of two teachers who placed students in collaborative writing groups and asked students to assess their writing groups in personnel assessment memos to the instructors. Examines selected examples of these memos with regard to collaborative processes and the skills used most frequently by students. (HB)

The social contexts students need to encourage productive collaboration in their writing can be provided by attending to various design features of the English microcomputer laboratory. Collaborative learning offers a powerful alternative to traditional classroom teaching methods and helps students become part of a community that approximates the…

A project at Loyola University of Chicago and Northwestern University has three teams of two students each write papers and present them at a joint meeting. One team from a university writes in support of a particular side, while its counterpart at the other university takes the opposite view. (MLW)

Reviews studies that deal with word processing and writing. Areas covered include surveys of research on the effects of word processing on writing instruction; students' attitudes toward writing; composing behavior; collaborative writing; revising; and reading and writing, emphasizing screen design. Implications for instruction are then suggested.…

Although collaborative learning is most commonly used in modern writing classes, an experiment in collaborative learning was conducted with a beginning drawing class at California University of Pennsylvania. Students (elementary education majors) were paired and asked to produce a single drawing of a still life. They were then asked to repeat the…

A study was conducted to evaluate the final outcome of the Section 98 writing project, a 3-year collaboration between the School District of the City of Saginaw and the University of Michigan, and to successfully employ the gap reduction design with the pre- to post-test results stemming from the writing project. Students in six sections of…

Third and fourth graders' talk during collaborative writing assignments with teachers and peers was transcribed and coded. Found that the students devoted a significant amount of peer and teacher interaction to the subject of spelling, and that the amount of talk about spelling did not vary with the spelling ability of the students. (MDM)

An online collaborative writing project was carried between two report writing classes from two separate institutions, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Polytechnic (SP). The aim was to test how successfully a peer-to-peer mentoring system could be established using asynchronous and synchronous communication features. The…

Educators at all levels are increasingly being told that classrooms should be places where students are guided through processes of critical inquiry, work collaboratively, and use both written and oral languages as tools for learning. The value of a collaborative, language-centered approach to teaching and learning can be demonstrated by drawing…

Based on an examination of the organizational features of editing during collaborative computer writing in a combined first and second grade classroom in a Catholic school during the 1985-86 school year, this paper argues that there is a fundamental difference between collaborative and solo computer writing, and that collaboration during computer…

Describes a course that resulted from the interest and need of the academic-advising office to serve undecided students more efficiently, preferably in a group-advising format. Finds that the resulting atmosphere seems to help students make significant progress in writing and in understanding their indecision. (MG)

In this article the author, discusses how the National Writing Project (NWP) prepares participating teachers for leadership roles by demonstrating their most effective classroom practices, studying research, and improving their knowledge of writing by becoming writers themselves. NWP prepares teachers to articulate and interrogate their practice…

Surveying a project that was conducted through the Center for the Study of Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, this book details the classroom inquiries conducted during the 4-year project (1988-1992) by 33 teacher-researchers from secondary and postsecondary classrooms. The articles and their authors are: (1) "Teachers as Theory…

This multiple case study examined the coauthorship process in research laboratories of different university departments. The study focused on two cases comprising five writing teams, one in biochemistry and microbiology and four in earth and ocean sciences. The role of the research supervisor, the role of the student (graduate and postgraduate),…