The main purpose of this study was to test the general hypothesis that ongoing computerized procedural facilitation with strategies and writingrelated metacognitions during writing improves learners' writing while being helped, as well as leaves a cognitive residue in the form of subsequently improved writing, once that help is removed. Three groups of 20 ninth to eleventh graders participated in the study. One group wrote five essays while being guided by unsolicited continuous metacognitivelike guides presented by a specially designed computer tool (the Writing Partner); a second group received the same guidance but only upon the writer's voluntary solicitation; and the third group received no guidance and wrote with only a word processor (control group). The study's main hypothesis was confirmed with respect to the unsolicited-guidance group which wrote better training essays, showed evidence of having internalized the explicitly provided guidance, and demonstrated significant subsequent improvement in writing when no computerized tool was available anymore. The solicited-guidance group and the control group showed virtually no improvement, and unlike in the unsolicited-guidance group, initially poorer writers continued to lag behind initially better writers.MICHAL ZELLERMAYER is an assistant professor in the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She specializes in the psychology and teaching of writing.GAVRIEL SALOMON is a professor in the College of Education, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. He specializes in the cultivation of higher-order thinking skills and the use of computer tools in the classroom.TAMAR GLOBERSON. deceased, was an associate professor in the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University. She specialized in cognitive development and learning environments.HANNA GIVON is a teacher in the Kibbutz Ma'abarat Regional High School, Israel. She specializes in ESL, writing, and the teaching of writing.

In this study we review our own experience of coordinating learning in a professional community of student supervisors in the context of curricular change that took place in the elementary school program of our teacher education college. We present an analysis of four excerpts of conversations about change selected from a larger corpus of data, consisting of transcripts of the weekly department meetings that took place during an entire academic year in which the curricular change was implemented, representing four critical events that brought about the emergence of the interactive dynamic of this self-organizing community. We explain the catalytic power of these events through the theoretical framework of complexity theory. We show how complexity theory can be used for focusing on the dynamics of professional learning at work, as a process of influencing each other's learning and development, possibly leading to the reciprocal transformation of the members of the community.

This paper identifies four successive phases in the study of written feedback to students' compositions. The studies included in these phases are distinguished by views of writing instruction reflected in their theoretical frameworks: the view of writing instruction as a series of teacher provided stimuli and students' responses to these stimuli; the view that the writing class is a rhetorical community, where teacher and students interact as readers and writers over texts; the view of learning to write as a phenomenon both natural and problematic, where school may interfere with students' natural development; the view that learning to write, like all other learning, depends on successful studentteacher interactions within student's zone of proximal development. While reviewing recent studies of written feedback, the paper shows how these changing views of writing instruction are accompanied by changing theoretical perspectives for the study of the provision and processing of written feedback as well as by a gradual expansion of research contexts for looking at this problem. Finally, in view of such a line of development, it suggests an agenda for future research. The study of teachers' written feedback to students' writing and the theory of writing instructionIn theories of development and learning (Vygotsky, 1978;Brophy, 1981 andAnderson, 1982) response plays a central role. Hence, learning writers, like learners of other skills, need to know when they are performing well and when they are not. However, for learning writers the issue of feedback is especially significant. These writers need response not only for monitoring their own progress, but so that they learn to take another's perspective and adapt a message to it (Flower, 1979). Theoretically, constructive feedback offers such writers a means of discovering their readers' needs. This review will show that in effect, most learners do not receive such feedback.Writing theorists view the issue of feedback as problematic, because "...feedback to complex processes is usually inadequate and the level of mastery that the social environment supports is quite short of what that culture actually seems to need" (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1982, p. 59). Along these lines, it has been pointed out by a number of writing instruction theorists (e.g. Sommers, 1982) that in learning to write, feedback, provided and processed ineffectively, may inhibit the writer's motivation for writing. According to them, ineffective feedback may divert the writer's attention from his or her own purposes and focus that attention on the teacher's intentions. 146A considerable number of recent studies have dealt with the questions of the provision and processing of written feedback to learning writers. On the whole, the current view is that written feedback is probably the least useful type of response students get to their writing (Freedman, 1987). Yet, because written feedback is the most common form of writing instruction, theorists are still searching for a way to describe the parameter...

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