In order to understand factors that encourage or discourage adolescents' participation in school writing classes and influence their motivation to become skilled writers, we interviewed high school students about their writing experiences, goals, and processes and analyzed their statements for patterns of goal pursuit. Nineteen students of varying achievement levels and classroom placements (8 boys and 11 girls, 6 African American and 13 European American) who had been previously interviewed in fifth and sixth grades were interviewed again in the tenth grade. Goals arising from developmental and personal life issues were central to these adolescent writers, whose writing motivation was heavily influenced by the extent to which they perceived they were encouraged to write authentic personal texts whose messages were respected by caring teachers. The low achieving and alienated students whose writing motivation had declined from earlier years did not now believe they received respect for their ideas, but that their teacher was interested only in their texts' basic organization and display of proper grammatical conventions. Methods for teaching writing that enlist and honor the personal goals of adolescents and support their motivation to write are described.

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Inquiry projects have not been easy to evaluate within the parameters of academic grading systems. Rubric-guided assessment of inquiry projects is discussed in this chapter along with the advantages and problems associated with this approach.Academic disciplines are defined not only by bodies of knowledge but also by ways of knowing-by interpretive frameworks and methods of investigation. Merely mastering a knowledge base does not mean one is educated in that field; education in a discipline involves engaging in investigations to create knowledge in ways particular to that discipline. Intellectual communities can be viewed, in fact, as networks of individuals who engage with others in the field in "a common search for meaning" in their work or academic lives (Westerhoff, 1987).In this chapter I focus on student assignments that consist of this search for meaning. I use the term inquiry project to refer to these assignments, although they take many different forms-some formal in nature, others more casual. The common elements are that students formulate and pursue questions of personal interest using multiple sources of information and, usually, multiple investigative methods. Concepts from the particular discipline (or course) provide a framework for the methodology and findings.Involving students in inquiry projects has come to be viewed as a critical component of learning in many fields of higher education (Mishler, 1990;Smagorinsky, 1996). These investigations make visible the methodology, values, and intellectual stance of the discipline. They reveal to students their own knowledge in ways that only the use of knowledge in real settings can offer, and they demonstrate in powerful ways how knowledge is used in a field (Schon, 1987). Additionally, the integration of personal purposes with academic learning is critical in assisting career decisions and creating early initiation into professional roles and commitments.Inquiry projects, so desirable from the standpoint of student commitment and learning, have not been easy to evaluate within the parameters of academic grading systems. As an example of one solution to this problem, I describe an approach to grading used for an inquiry project that I have assigned over the past four years in several classes. Exhibit 9.1 shows the handout that describes this project.

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