This study of writing-intensive (WI) undergraduate natural and applied science courses examined the relationships among instructors' course goals, instructional activities, and students' assessment of their learning of content and writing. Using multiple sources of data, investigators found that instructors held common goals but varied greatly in their instructional activities. Findings suggest that science instructors can be described along a continuum anchored by instructor as corrector on one end and instructor as collaborator on the other. Instructors who were the sole audience for a single writing assignment were correctors. Collaborators varied writing tasks, encouraged collaboration, and emphasized professional contexts for writing; they generally received highest student satisfaction ratings. Peer editing assignments that simulated critical, anonymous journal reviews affected female and male students differently. The findings support the National Academy of Science's teaching standards and assumptions concerning the crucial roles of instructors in socializing students into science communities. We discuss instructional strategies that may be more inclusive to traditionally underrepresented groups such as females and minorities. Clearly, a writing-intensive class requires that I as professor give a lot of thought about what kind of assignments I give. When I was an undergraduate, none of the classes I took in science had an opportunity for interaction except in the laboratory portions where you got paired with somebody, and that was more to get the work done. We almost never did sit down together to discuss calculations or the results we had obtained. Sometimes I feel it's too bad it took me so long to get where I am. It's kind of like growing up, an evolutionary process. When you don't have any mentors to teach you how to teach, to show what good teaching is, then I guess it has to be an evolutionary process. (Agronomy professor)Writing gives us a chance to use the terminology that we've learned so that we become comfortable with it. We learn new words every day, new terms. How to describe a rock or a mineral. And if you don't use the terms in your writing or your speech, you're never going to become comfortable with those words. So it helps a lot. It's going to help me when I go to grad school. I know I'm going to have to do a lot of writing. It's-I don't This study explored the instructional contexts and teacher roles associated with students' development of professional communication skills in a set of undergraduate science classrooms. It was intended to take advantage of a relatively new graduation requirement at the sponsoring university: Students must complete several courses that make extensive use of writing, courses officially designated as writing intensive. Our basic approach was to view the science classroom-and the many activities associated with science writing assignments-as a particular context for learning to use the language of science. The idea that science classrooms can be se...

This study draws on the perceptions and experiences of upper-division students enrolled in writing-intensive (WI) classes in their majors at a large state university. During extended interviews, students reported confidence in dealing with the writing requirements of their majors and predicted success in future job-related writing situations. The primary bases for this confidence are their experiences with a significant number of WI assignments and their ability to engage a variety of resources and use the knowledge thereby obtained. Students particularly valued research-related writing assignments in the major as opportunities for professional skills development and identity building. The authors discuss findings as they relate to the ideologies of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines. The authors argue for greater attention to students' readiness to make connections across assignments, courses, and disciplines; they also suggest greater attention to a field's inquiry methods and strategies for solving problems.

No abstract

A writer's evaluation of text plays critical, but little examined, roles in the writer's production of text and development as writer. Twenty students, grades 2-6, ranked unevaluated sets of compositions that they or anonymous peers had written; they then were prompted to discuss the factors upon which their rankings were based. Analysis of their evaluations suggests that bases for evaluations can be described in four categories: feelings aroused by text; responses to surface features; responses to text as understood; responses to craftsmanship.Many experts contend that the current "writing crisis" results from "skills deficits." Yet it is difficult to read through the catalogue of writing errors discussed by Shaughnessy (1977) without at least entertaining the possibility that behind the various skills deficits lurks a causal array of their creators' cognitive differences. Emig (1982), Lunsford (1979, and others who relate writing skills to a developmental framework have pointed out that writing tasks that demand cognitive operations beyond an individual writer's abilities are likely to stunt rather than challenge the development of required skills.Several recent studies have investigated the relationship between cognitive development and writing abilities. Graves (1982Graves ( , 1983 has used the accumulated data from his years of research with children's writing to sketch the order in which a child's consciousness of writing

These studies investigated the degree to which prompts and topic types affect the writing performance of college freshmen. The students (N = 3,452) taking the 1989 and 1990 Manoa Writing Placement Examination (MWPE) were required to write in response to two types of topics (for a total of 6,904 essays): one in response to a reading passage and another in response to a question based on personal experience. Ten such prompt sets were used in this study. Study 1 indicated that the MWPE testing procedures were reasonably reliable and consistent across semesters but that student responses to individual prompts and prompt sets were significantly different from each other. Study 2 showed that if two topic types and a large number of prompts are involved, the differences that arise in the performance on prompts or topic types can be minimized by examining the students' mean scores and changing the pairings so that the prompt sets are more equitable in subsequent administrations.