The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test used to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER…

This study was conducted to obtain empirical data to inform policy decisions about exempting incoming students from a first-year composition (FYC) course on the basis of Advanced Placement (AP) English exam scores. It examined the effect of avoiding first-year writing on the writing abilities of sophomore undergraduates. Two three-page writing…

Findings indicate some evidence of the adult basic writer's reliance on the oral repertoire when communicating in the written mode. (DD)

Concludes that remedial writers' writing processes are shorter and of poorer quality than those of traditional writers, and that what separates the groups is the ability to reflect on what is being written. (DD)

Impromtu pre- and post-test essays by 302 students randomly selected from over 80 sections of a first-semester freshman composition course revealed significant improvement. (DD)

Tentative conclusions were that controlled sentence practice and sentence combining can increase the overall writing effectiveness and syntactic maturity of college students in a single semester. (DD)

Studied how college students altered their syntax when they received direct instruction in sentence combining. (DD)

Concluded that compulsory writing generally increased the writing apprehension of college freshmen enrolled in the basic composition course. (DD)

Concluded that freshmen entering the University of California, Los Angeles; were more likely to meet the university's freshman writing standards if they had more opportunity to learn expository writing during high school. (DD)

Sought to discover to what extent perceived quality differences in freshman expository writing could be measured quantitatively in terms of choice or method of utilization of syntactic structures. (DD)

Demonstrated effectiveness in eliciting growth in number of words per T-unit through the use of sentence-combining exercises in a college composition course and related frequency of embedding errors to data on length of T-unit. (DD)

Both in standard factors of syntactic maturity and in measures of overall writing quality, first year college students trained in sentence combining achieved significantly higher scores than students following a conventional curriculum. (DD)

The treatment group of college freshmen, which worked with the Strong-Christensen sentence-combining materials during an intensive six-week period, scored significantly higher on two factors of syntactic maturity than the control group. (DD)

A study which defines some easily measurable syntactic and semantic cues within student essays that predict and perhaps determine readers' responses. (DD)

This study assessed the validity of the College-Level Examination Program's (CLEP) General Examination in English Composition using the CLEP Subject Examination in English Composition. (DD)