What is

Just what defines "college-level" writing? This book seeks to engage this essential question with care, patience, and pragmatism, and includes contributions by many well-known scholars. This edited collection offers perspectives from high school teachers, who present their concerns about the discrepancy between what they tell their students is important in college writing courses and what students actually learn is important; student contributors, who write about their experiences transitioning from high school writing to college-level writing; and administrators, who address such issues as what other departments within a university consider college-level writing.

WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs

The writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement, now more than 25 years old, has remained a stable part of the educational landscape, outlasting other educational innovations by adapting to new educational initiatives. This collection of essays describes how WAC programs have adapted and continue to adapt to meet new challenges.

Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing

With this updated document, NCTE and IRA reaffirm their position that the primary purpose of assessment must be to improve teaching and learning for all students. Eleven core standards are presented and explained, and a helpful glossary makes this document suitable not only for educators but for parents, policymakers, school board members, and other stakeholders. Case studies of large-scale national tests and smaller scale classroom assessments (particularly in the context of RTI, or Response to Intervention) are used to highlight how assessments in use today do or do not meet the standards.

Designing Writing Assignments

Effective student writing begins with well-designed classroom assignments. In Designing Writing Assignments, veteran educator Traci Gardner offers practical ways for teachers to develop assignments that will allow students to express their creativity and grow as writers and thinkers while still addressing the many demands of resource-stretched classrooms.

Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers

In Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers, Lee Ann Carroll argues for a developmental perspective to counter the fantasy held by many college faculty that students should, or could, be taught to write once so that ever after, they can write effectively on any topic, any place, any time. Carroll demonstrates in this volume why a one- or two-semester, first-year course in writing cannot meet all the needs of even more experienced writers. She then shows how students' complex literacy skills develop slowly, often idiosyncratically, over the course of their college years, as they choose or are coerced to take on new roles as writers.