This article links failed reform to failed education through a case study of an annual collaborative revision of a program textbook in the Composition Program at the University of California at Irvine. Review of successive editions of the program’s Student Guide to Writing at UCI reveals a progressive retreat from the program’s pedagogical commitments and the reappearance of product-oriented instruction.

Christine Ross, Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse: Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Dec., 2003), pp. 302-329

Background: Previous research suggests that there are advantages to writing in groups or in pairs compared with writing individually, and that men write differently from women. However, as far as we know, no one has yet used new technology to assess published academic articles written in these different modes. Method: We assembled 80 papers from recent issues of the Journal of Educational Psychology as follows: 21 authored by individual men, 21 by individual women, 19 by pairs of men, and 19 by pairs of women. We then used two computer-based measures to assess various textual features of the Abstracts, the Introductions, and the Discussion sections of these 80 papers. Results: Several differences were found between these various parts of the journal articles (e.g., the Discussions were more readable than the Introductions and these in turn were more readable than the Abstracts). However, there were few differences between the writing of pairs or individuals, or between that of men and women. Conclusions: There was no real evidence to support the notion that writing in pairs would lead to better quality articles or that there would be differences between the readability of papers produced by men and women. Such differences may occur, however, before peer review.

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When two-year college students take time to write at length, paying more attention to their own feelings and those of their readers through regular response and revision, they write better, according to the results of a three-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

E-mail peer response teaches students about audience and text more effectively than synchronous peer response.

Pedagogical triangulation is a threefold method for teaching that involves a holistic approach to classroom collaboration. The specific elements of pedagogical triangulation are described, along with the results of applying this approach in a first-semester college English class.

In the second edition of Writing Without Teachers (1998), Peter Elbow issues an explicit "challenge. . . for people to engage me in a theoretical context" (xxv, xxvii). When Elbow is read "carefully" as he requests, much more is at stake than the reputation of one "expressivist" (xxvii). For John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy provides a theoretical framework that not only highlights the strengths of Elbow's theory but also exposes some flaws of social theory and practices so that they can be revised.

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Shows how an editing assignment emphasizing punctuation can help students in a first-year writing class discover new ideas and perspectives as part of the revision process. Considers a class that experimented with editing punctuation for a dual purpose--as a revision heuristic as well as for correctness. Reconsiders editing and revision assignments to take better advantage of editing’s generative powers.

This article explores the role of embodied knowledge and embodied representation in the joint revision of a small section of a large technical document by personnel from two organizations: a city government and a consulting engineering firm. The article points to differences between the knowledge and the representation practices of personnel from the two organizations as manifested in their words and gestures during the revision task, and it points to the gestures of the city personnel as a principal means by which their greater embodied knowledge of channel easements becomes distributed across the group as a whole. The article concludes by pointing to some advantages of considering acts of writing as embodied practices and by indicating a number of related questions that should be pursued in subsequent investigations of literacy in modern workplaces.

Peer review requires training and reinforcement to be successful, yet, even then, students often lack the experience and perception to offer good advice to one another. Ransdell, advocates instead for more focused guidance through use of whole-class workshops. Here, she explains the logistics of running a class workshop and addresses both the advantages and disadvantages of the technique, noting that the negatives are far outweighed by the positives.

In this archaeological investigation of the work of Louise Rosenblatt, we read and highlighted all text-level differences between the 1st (1938) and 5th (1995) editions of Literature as Exploration. We categorized each type of revision, traced a sample of each to the edition in which the change was made, and then extended our analysis to 70 passages.

This article describes the importance of annotation to reading and writing practices and reviews new technologies that complicate the ways annotation can be used to support and enhance traditional reading, writing, and collaboration processes. Important directions for future research are discussed, with emphasis on studying how professionals read and annotate, how readers might use annotations that have been produced by others, and how the interface of an annotation program affects collaboration and communication on revision. In each area, the authors emphasize issues and methods that will be productive for enhancing theories of workplace and classroom communication as well as implications for the optimal design of annotation technologies.

In this study, the author examines the ways a small group of students and their teacher from an intermediate-level university writing class use the texts they create to negotiate private and shared public understandings of the complex interactional contexts of their work together. The author begins by examining some of the competing goals and motives that energize the participants' classroom efforts. To understand the sources of those diverse purposes and how they serve to shape and sustain subsequent classroom interactions, the author develops an activity-based framework of analysis that draws extensively from dialogical and functional-linguistic approaches to language, context, and interaction. Writing and written communication are portrayed as linguistically mediated and interactively structured processes of contextualization. Implications for how we conceptualize and organize classroom interactions, such as intensive peer review and student-teacher conferencing, and the central role that talk and writing must play in operationalizing those interactional contexts are discussed.

This study explores the relation between fluency in writing and linguistic experience and provides information about the processes involved in written text composition. The authors conducted a think-aloud protocol study with native speakers of English who were learning French or German. Analysis reveals that as the writer's experience with the language increases, fluency (as measured by words written per minute) increases, the average length of strings of words proposed between pauses or revision episodes increases, the number of revision episodes decreases, and more of the words that are proposed as candidate text get accepted. To account for these results, the authors propose a model of written language production and hypothesize that the effect of linguistic experience on written fluency is mediated primarily by two internal processes called the translator and the reviser.

This article details study results comparing e-mail and synchronous conferencing as vehicles for online peer response. The study draws on Clark and Brennan's theory of communicative “grounding,” which predicts that participants use different techniques for achieving mutual knowledge depending on the type of media being used. Content analysis of transcripts from both types of response sessions showed that when using e-mail, students made significantly greater reference to documents, their contents, and rhetorical contexts than when using synchronous conferencing. Students made greater reference to both writing and response tasks using synchronous chats than when using e-mail. Students' individual media preferences showed no significant differences in terms of message formulation, reception, and usefulness of comments in aiding revision. However, in a forced comparison scale, students rated e-mail more serious and helpful than chats, which were then rated more playful than e-mail. Implications of the study's results and areas for future research are also discussed.

Notes that finding a way to integrate grading and responding in a manner that promotes learning through revision is one major challenge for composition instructors. Argues that instructors must find a way to shape their classrooms shifting the emphasis from “getting it right the first time,” to learning to see writing as an activity that evolves and improves through revision.

Offers 4 brief descriptions from college writing teachers of activities they use successfully. Describes using a “round robin” process for group writing and revision; addressing stylistic and grammatical issues by using anonymous student writing; “showing” versus “telling” words; and using film to model “larger” meaning in personal narrative.

Considers how the revising skills of basic writing students improve when they receive both inductive and deductive teacher feedback. Finds that students who received inductive feedback changed their largest percent of errors when given oral conferences and students who received deductive feedback changed their smallest number of errors when given oral feedback.

This article examines the production of new history textbooks that appeared after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is argued that the radical revisions in official history in this context are shaped by the Bakhtinian process of “hidden dialogicality,” whereby new, post-Soviet narratives respond to earlier Soviet narratives in various ways. It is argued that different forms of hidden dialogicality are employed to revise official accounts of the Russian Civil War and World War II. In the former case, new texts respond to their Soviet precursors through processes of “re-emplotment,” whereas in the case of World War II, the plot is left largely unchanged, but the main characters are changed. Although many political, cultural, and economic forces play a role in the revision of any official history, it is argued that the importance of hidden dialogicality between narrative forms needs to be taken into account as well.

This is a piece about language and how we evaluate the work of young writers as they learn to express themselves in writing. The authors' focus is on current reforms in writing assessment, including the brief life of the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) writing portfolios, and how they rarely address the vibrant role of language—the work and play of words—in students' writing. Through audio taped interviews with two elementary and two middle school students and their teachers, as well as the written artifacts in the students' portfolios, we analyzed the patterns of the students' writing and the comments of teachers and peers on their work. In this article, language in writing is metaphorically compared to “the clay that makes the pot,” emphasizing that young writers want to startle, want to engage readers with refreshing and surprising language—but few are provided the guidance for how to do it. The authors' central point is that writing revolves around criticism, but if the assessment stays on the surface and encourages word substitution over content revision, then the criticism may not be helpful in pushing the generative aspect of writing: the work of language.

Presents eight separate short descriptions of teaching tips or classroom activities for composition classes submitted by teachers, including tips on writing exchanges, grammar problems, peer evaluation, revision, mock quizzes, critical thinking regarding television news, computer–assisted commenting, and an educational and entertaining end–of–term review activity period.

Describes how instructors at two different colleges in Montana (a tribal college and a distant community college) collaboratively teach composition courses (using the same reading and assignments, and doing peer revision for each other). Describes how this approach breaks through cultural, ideological, intellectual "containments;" engages in academic discourse; and enters into new discourse communities.

Examines representatives of the story cycle genre--Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine” and Gloria Naylor’s “The Women of Brewster Place.” Examines a revisionary episode from each text to situate story cycles in a frame that embraces both Western and non-Western traditions. Suggests that scholars, teachers, and students see and celebrate the diverse realities of spirituality, magic, and communal memory.Examines representatives of the story cycle genre--Louise Erdrich’s "Love Medicine" and Gloria Naylor’s "The Women of Brewster Place." Examines a revisionary episode from each text to situate story cycles in a frame that embraces both Western and non-Western traditions. Suggests that scholars, teachers, and students see and celebrate the diverse realities of spirituality, magic, and communal memory.

Suggests that Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” is a faithful and a “profoundly subversive” revision of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Argues that the terms in which the novel have been most frequently praised, no less than the case made for banning it, raise important questions about the relationship between the novel’s secret and the source of Smiley’s Shakespearean “production.”

[This book] is a must for those committed to voicing the personal conflicts writers experience and to turning those confusing and sometimes dismaying moments into productive sites for questioning textual relations. - Journal of Advanced CompositionIn Getting Restless, Nancy Welch calls for a reconception of what we mean by revision, urging compositionists to rethink long-held beliefs about teacher-student relations and writing practices. Drawing primarily on feminist and psychoanalytic theories, she considers how revision can be redefined not as a process of increasing orientations toward a particular thesis or discourse community, but instead as a process of disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries--a practice of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one's text and one's life. Using ethnographic, case-study, and autobiographical research methods, Welch maintains two consistent aims throughout the study: to show how composition teachers can create for themselves and for their students environments that encourage and support revision as restlessness and as a process of intervening in a first draft's thoroughly social meanings and identifications to demonstrate how composition's process legacy is revitalized when we understand that our means to form and change communities- to form and change constructions of authority--are located in revision. In achieving these ends Welch examines three academic sites: a campus writing center, undergraduate writing classrooms, and a summer workshop for K-12 teachers. This book will appeal to a wide audience, including classroom and writing center teachers, historians and theorists in composition and rhetoric, feminist theorists, and those engaged in literacy studies, teacher education, and connections/tensions among teaching, writing, and psychoanalysis.

The literature on formative text evaluation pays scant attention to the revision phase following data collection. This article describes a small-scale experiment in which five professional writers were asked to revise brochure fragments on the basis of feedback from readers. The feedback consisted of readers' comments, selected from the results of a pretest of the brochures, regarding their acceptance of the information and their appreciation of text elements. Despite the wide variety of solutions that resulted, some interesting tendencies were found: In response to problems with factual acceptance, writers often decided to add information; in response to problems with normative acceptance, they often chose to substitute material; and in response to appreciation problems, they either deleted the problematic passage or substituted a different phrase.

This study compares two methods of pretesting—the plus-minus method and the think-aloud method—with respect to their suitability for evaluating sites on the World Wide Web. These methods are often used for pretesting printed texts, but how appropriate are they for evaluating Web sites? The study compares the two methods with respect to the number of problems they detected, the nature of these problems, and the amount of feedback they yielded for revision. Participants using the plus-minus method detected a greater number of different types of problems than those using the think-aloud method, primarily because participants using the plus-minus method were more inclined to detect appreciation problems. Also, participants using the plus-minus method offered more suggestions about how to resolve the problems they had detected than those participants using the think-aloud method.

The process of academic peer review—i.e., students evaluating each other's work—can help instructors address a host of higher institutional objectives, not the least of which is the total quality management of collegiate teaching. But more is known about this process from the viewpoint of instructors than from the perspective of students. The purpose of this study was to formally examine student views of a specific peer-review system in which undergraduates assigned final grades to each other's term papers. A survey instrument revealed a high degree of comfort with the process, as well as some insights into why a few students were uncomfortable with it.

This article presents the results of a study into revision skills of 32 elementary students in Grades 5-6 (van Gelderen &amp; Blok, 1989). Their task consisted of improving an expository text, experimentally composed on the basis of several texts written by students of the same age as the subjects. The subjects were asked to think aloud and to give explicit evaluations, diagnoses, and suggestions for improvement of the text. Quantitative data are supplemented with a qualitative analysis of the revision activities. Reformulations and verbalizations during the process are analyzed. The analysis aims at the students' potentials for revision on the level of communicative content. Explanations based on a model of the revision process by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) are explored. This model specifies the most important cognitive steps in revision: compare, diagnose, and operate (CDO). Quantitative analysis of revision behavior showed that the subjects did possess the necessary skills to carry out each of the steps under experimental conditions designed to facilitate the revision process. The qualitative analysis, however, showed that many difficulties had yet to be overcome. The study concludes that it would be worthwhile to direct more explicit attention to further development of revision skills of primary students than is the case in current writing instruction at schools.

Serial collaboration promotes the many possibilities of developing and revising student texts.

In a benchmark meta-analysis of experimental research findings from 1962 to 1982, Hillocks (1986) reported the varying effects of general modes of instruction and specific instructional activities (foci) on the quality of student writing. The main purpose of the present study was to explore the relative effectiveness of those modes and foci using a non-experimental methodology and a new group of 16 teachers and 275 students in grades 1, 3–6, and 8. Teachers who had attended a summer writing institute reported on 17 different instructional variables that were primarily derived from the meta-analysis during each week of a ten-week treatment period that occurred at the beginning of the next school year. A pre- and post- treatment large-scale writing assessment was used with a prompt that allowed latitude in student choice of topic and extra time for prewriting and/or revision. Large gains in quality and quantity were found in the lower grades (1, 3, and 4) and smaller gains were found in the middle grades (5, 6, and 8). The demographic variables of SES, primary language, residence, and gender were found to have small and/or insignificant relationships to gains. Teacher-determined combinations of instructional variables and their relationship to gains in quality were investigated through factor analysis while controlling for pretreatment individual differences. Only one combination of activities was associated with large gains, and it was interpretable as the environmental mode of instruction. This combination included inquiry, prewriting, writing about literature, and the use of evaluative scales.

The inquiry posed two basic research questions: a) Could changes in student writing be tied to conferencing, and b) Could the status of the student (weaker or stronger student, native or non-native speaker) or the type of writing course (general freshman composition or specialized genre-specific course) be tied to any systematic differences in the conferencing process or its outcome? This study tracked the discourses generated by 4 teachers around a set of their teacher-student writing conferences. They collected copies of first drafts, tapes of their conferences, and copies of subsequent drafts from one stronger and one weaker student, for a total of 8 students and 32 texts. All students revised their papers in ways indicating that the conference had had an effect on their revision process. The findings indicate that what is ostensibly the “same” treatment does not generate the same response from all students. They also indicate that the divergent backgrounds students bring to instructional events have a structuring effect that cannot be dismissed solely as teacher bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

Current scholarship indicates that most writing students read and make use of teachers’ written comments on their drafts and find some types of comments more helpful than others. But the research is unclear about which comments students find most useful and why. This article presents the results of a survey of 142 first- year college writing students’ perceptions about teacher comments on a writing sample. A 40-item questionnaire was used to investigate students’ reactions to three variables of teacher response: focus, specificity, and mode. The survey found that these college students seemed equally interested in getting responses on global matters of content, purpose, and organization as on local matters of sentence structure, wording, and correctness, but were wary of negative comments about ideas they had already expressed in their text. It also found that these students favored detailed commentary with specific and elaborated comments, but they did not like comments that sought to control their writing or that failed to provide helpful criticism for improving the writing. They most preferred comments that provided employed open questions, or included explanations that guided revision.

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Housewives and Compositionists Akua Duku Anokye Mapping the Terrain of Tracks and Streams Suellynn Duffey What’s It Worth and What’s It For? Revisions to Basic Writing Revisited Judith Rodby

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This project investigated the effects of training for peer response in university freshman composition classes over the course of one 15-week semester. Eight sections of composition (total n = 169) participated. Students in the experimental group, composed of four sections, were trained via teacher-student conferences in which the teacher met students in groups of three to develop and practice strategies for peer response. Students in the control group, also four sections, received no systematic training aside from viewing a video example. The experimental and the control groups were compared with respect to the quantity and quality of feedback generated on peer writing as well as student interaction during peer response sessions. Analyses of data indicated that training students for peer response led to significantly more and significantly better-quality peer feedback and livelier discussion in the experimental group.