Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

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Researchers are freer now than ever before to pursue a wide variety of research questions approached from diverse theoretical perspectives through the use of many different research tools. The cost of this freedom is the necessity to outline theoretical frameworks for study and to explain how that theory informs the tools of research. The studies in this issue of RTE serve as models of the methodological clarity and rigor that are now required in scholarly research.

Dewey and other theorists have proposed that conflict or dissonance is a necessary precursor to investigation. The articles in this issue focus on the problematic, and illustrate the ways in which productive tensions can help move the field forward.

Argues that what matters in being a good student is not an innate set of skills and dispositions but an understanding of what, where, when, and how to perform through particular situations. Teachers set the ground rules for what kinds of performances are acceptable in the classroom, and a classroom is a contact zone in which different sets of values, skills, and expectations coexist. The articles in this issue demonstrate how teachers and students manage to negotiate this contact.

The editors note how the variant meanings of context shape research, and return to the etymology of the word to define context as a relationship among people and their settings, which typically include multiple sets of overlapping goals, values, discourses, tools, and other artifacts of social life. The articles appearing in this issue suggest the multiple ways in which attention to context can inform literacy research.

The editors discuss the concept voice and its implied author as it is defined in both Romantic and cultural perspectives. Differences in conceptions of teaching reading follow from these two traditions. According to he Romantic tradition, the reader should have a personal response to text, free from culture or any outside influence. By the cultural perspective, readers interpret texts through frameworks that are developed through engagement in cultural practice.

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The editors expound on the term telos, the concept of an optimal developmental outcome that provides the motive for the ways in which people are socialized within a culture. The notion of a telos for schooling is important because it provides the ideal toward which all are expected to gravitate. Conceptions of how students should develop suggest ways of being a teacher and paths for improving practice, which in turn suggest ways of being a teacher educator.

Researchers have begun to focus on the role of culture in teaching and learning, drawing on other disciplines to reconsider literacy activities as socially purposeful and culturally grounded. The interest raises two questions: what aspects of culture are more important than others? And what impact does the researcher’s perspective on culture have on the focus and contact of the study? The articles in this issue suggest a range of answers that scholars or offering to these questions.

In search of criteria that characterize the research most likely to have an impact in the field of literacy research, the editors include reduction and reciprocity. Writers and readers build a reciprocal relationship - one in which the writer and author are in tune with one another - when the writer considers the processes in which the reader is likely to engage to comprehend the text. Reduction is one such process. Arguments that include images, metaphors, or phrasings that help readers reduce the text become the most memorable and the most influential in the field.

Traditionally, university faculty have been evaluated and promoted according to their ability to produce sole-authored publications. The age of copyright also pushed to discourage acknowledgement of contributions made by others. However, it has long been acknowledged that new scholarship is based on citation, and social researchers contend that all thought is socially meditated and therefore collaborative. The issue becomes more complicated when research is conducted in conjunction with classroom teachers, whose classroom practices and insights are imperative to the observer’s analysis, and should, therefore, be co-authors.

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