The purpose of this study was to explore the motivation of a group of township learners who participated in a science fair known as Expo, by using phenomenography to explore their conceptions and experiences of Expo. The data comprised paragraphs written by the learners before the regional Expo and focus group interviews conducted afterwards. The…

Writing assignments are ubiquitous in higher education. Writing develops not only communication skills, but also higher-level cognitive processes that facilitate deep learning. Cognitive visualizations, such as concept maps, can also be used as part of learning activities including as a form of scaffolding, or to trigger reflection by making…

The author finds using software to make audio comments on students' writing improves students' understanding of her responses and increases their willingness to take her suggestions for revision more seriously. In the process of recording audio comments, she came to a new understanding of her students' writing needs and her responsibilities as…

Because communication skills, especially writing, are such an integral part of managerial work, it may be postulated that these skills are associated with managerial success. Yet evidence of writing competency is not universally considered for admission to MBA programs. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possible correlation between…

Students write papers in many of their courses to improve their writing skills and to foster an active attitude toward learning. Every year, they hand in hundreds of papers for teachers to assess. This stream may get polluted in two ways: by simple copying from Internet sources and by the exchange of text fragments between students. These…

Much composition pedagogy begins writing instruction within familiar territory. As a result, composition educators often structure curriculum and courses so that students first write in familiar genres, like personal narratives, and examine and critique their own lives, experiences, and even beliefs through those genres before turning to…

Participation, a commonly graded component of composition classrooms, is rarely the focus of current research studies. While some discussions have addressed grading practices or ways to increase participation, student and instructor voices have yet to be included in studies of classroom participation in composition courses. Yet these voices are…

Decades of research into which instructional strategies are successful in K-12 history and social studies conclude that having students write is extremely important. Effective writing assignments--whether a 3- to 5-paragraph essay, a longer term-paper-style assignment, or even a fictional short story based on a historical period or event--require…

This study examined the effect of journal writing on mathematics achievement in high-ability students in Singapore. It assessed both the cognitive benefits of journal writing (as evidenced through gains in math test scores) and the socio-affective benefits of journal writing (as demonstrated in their personal reflections) as the students learned…

This study is devoted to the effect of "textual metafunction" on the levels of coherence and cohesion in the Iranian EFL learners' English writing performance. Sixty Iranian intermediate EFL learners who were adult females participated in this study were randomly divided into two groups; experimental, and control. They were given a…

This quasi-experimental and pre/posttest study was designed to examine whether fourth-grade students who engaged in collaboratively writing letters to 11th-grade students performed better on tests of conceptual understanding of a unit on force and motion than students who did not. The participants included 835 fourth-grade students and 416…

Educators and researchers are increasingly calling for the processes of writing and knowledge construction to be an integral part of disciplinary learning. This article contributes to the literature by presenting an empirical analysis of a programme that was designed to expose students to the complexities of academic practices in conjunction with…

The objective of this study was to develop an online report writing activity that was a constructive and cooperative learning process for a course on traditional general physics experiments. Wiki, a CMC authoring tool, was used to construct the writing platform. Fifty-eight undergraduate students (33 men and 25 women), working in randomly assigned…

Trends among adolescents continue to be discouraging in terms of career and college readiness based on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) achievement reports and high school graduation rate data. In response, this article presents five goals and eight strategies we have engaged in during a seven-year research study focused on…

With the steady increase of ubiquitous computing initiatives across the country in the last decade, there is a pressing need for specific research looking at content area instruction in 1:1 settings. This qualitative multiple case study examines writing instruction at two middle schools as it is delivered by experienced teachers in five English…