The purpose of this research was to examine both what it means to teach writing and what it means to write in a first-year university course in the history of science. More specifically, I investigated what students learned about writing when the focus was mainly on subject matter and only secondarily on writing and rhetoric. A number of converging methods of research were used to address this issue: audiotaping classroom discourse and taking field notes, interviewing students and collecting retrospective protocols about their responses to a writing assignment, and analyzing students’ texts. The analyses indicated that classroom discourse focused primarily on framing concepts that brought into focus different and conflicting conceptions of the scientific method and the ways authorship in history is colored by writers’ subjectivity and perspective taking. Although students’ interpretations of the writing assignment were not very detailed, the texts they wrote revealed some understanding of how to use comparisons as a tool for analysis in writing history, the importance of attending to context in examining a given historical phenomenon, and the extent to which writing history is both interpretive and rhetorical. Yet neither the focal students nor the other students participating in this study responded uniformly to the assignment. The data raise the question of whether disciplinary courses in writing provide an authentic alternative to the space general writing skills courses currently occupy, particularly if such classes exist as sites where students are introduced to critical thinking and argumentative writing in college.

The purpose of this study is to trace the emergence of authorship in a beginning college writing classroom through two case examples. Three primary questions motivate this study of authorship: (a) What were students' interpretations of writing an essay based on sources? (b) How did these students organize their essays? and (c) What strategies did they use to advance their own ideas? An additional question focused on the instructional context of the course. In particular, how did the instructor represent the task of writing an essay based on different sources of information and the process of writing in the classroom? To answer these questions, each class was audiotaped during a 15-week semester and field notes were taken. Retrospective protocols and cued questions were used in order to understand students' evolving interpretations of the task they were given. The results show that although the instructor tried to foster a sense of engagement and commitment through reading, writing, and talking, the technical difficulty of the task, students' perceptions of their peers' interests, and a legacy of schooling and culture were equally important concerns that shaped the decisions made in writing. Implications for developing a theory of authorship are discussed as well as strategies for teaching.

Composition Studies emerged as a scholarly research discipline during the 1970s as (a) empirical methods became available to investigate the problem of meaning in discourse and, concomitantly, (b) the work of an international writing research community became institutionalized in the form of new journals and graduate programs. Distinguishing their efforts from prior histories of the field, the authors argue that the development of composition studies needs to be understood as part of a broader intellectual history affecting linguistics and literary studies, as well as composition. Reviewing basic tenets of formalism, structuralism (including both constructivism and social constructionism), and dialogism as root epistemologies organizing the recent histories of these disciplines, the authors conclude with a discussion of the dominant and often parallel themes that have characterized evolving conceptions of language, text, and meaning in composition, literature, and linguistics since the 1950s.

The purpose of this study was to examine how different writing tasks influence students’ thinking in reading and writing. The tasks used in this study, writing either a report or a problem-based essay, required students to integrate prior knowledge with information from six sources in order to create their own texts. The 15 undergraduates, enrolled in a seminar on European history, were randomly assigned to one of two task conditions, report or problem. Analyses focused on students’ acquisition of topic knowledge and the ways writers structured meaning as they organized and selected information. For insights into how writers approached these two tasks, all students provided think-aloud protocols and kept reading-writing logs. Classroom observations also provided information about contextual factors that can influence the strategies students use in reading to create their own texts. Comparisons made between the two groups revealed that they differed significantly in their interpretations of the two tasks and in their approaches to restructuring information from sources. However, there was no difference between the amount of prior knowledge that students writing reports and problem-based essays included in their essays, nor were there differences in learning. Both groups of students improved their understanding of a given historical event. Possible directions for future research are discussed.