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.

Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing

DESIGN DISCOURSE: COMPOSING AND REVISING PROGRAMS IN PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL WRITING addresses the complexities of developing professional and technical writing programs. The essays in the collection offer reflections on efforts to bridge two cultures - what the editors characterize as the "art and science of writing" - often by addressing explicitly the tensions between them. DESIGN DISCOURSE offers insights into the high-stakes decisions made by program designers as they seek to "function at the intersection of the practical and the abstract, the human and the technical."

Helping Doctoral Students Write - Pedagogies for Supervision

This essential guide offers a new approach to doctoral writing, written specifically for doctoral supervisors. Rejecting the DIY websites and manuals that promote a privatised skills-based approach to writing research, Kamler and Thomson offer a new framework for scholarly work to help doctorate students produce clear and well-argued dissertations. Drawing on a wide range of research and hands-on experience, the authors argue that making an original contribution to scholarly knowledge requires doctoral candidates to do both text and identity work. Their discussion of the complexities of forming a scholarly identity is illustrated by the stories and writing of real doctoral students.