The purpose of a study undertaken by the Center for the Cooperative Study of Instruction was to learn if a set of instructions could be prepared for students of composition which would indicate in behavioral terms what kind of writing was expected of them. These instructions, called "cognitive maps" consisted of a strategy and an exemplar which was to serve as a model for student writing. Four improvements in writing were stressed: better organization, better topic and concluding sentences, better use of detail, and development of a sense of audience and purpose. The study also tested the influence of the teaching method on the effectiveness of the maps. Two methods were used to present the maps to the students: the programed and highly-structured "errorless teacher" method, and the verbally-oriented and more casual "dialectic" method. The results of three experiments conducted with five teachers and 300 juniors, sophomores, and freshmen in two suburban high schools revealed that (1) maps bridge the communications gap between teacher and student, (2) maps enhance the quality of students' writing, and (3) the errorless method of teaching appears to be superior to the dialectical method in improving student achievement. (MP)