In this study, the author analyzes a sample of eleven freshman rhetorics to trace influences of the recent scholarship that has marked the emergence of composition studies as a scholarly discipline. The author classifies the textbooks according to the divisions of Berlin's taxonomy of the rhetorical epistemologies and the rhetorical schools that have influenced composition studies. The interactions of each textbook's treatment of invention and of each one's description or implicit working model of composing as a process are analyzed to support the classifications and to discuss how different concepts of invention and composition orient students toward the nature of knowledge. Although conclusions in this study should be limited to the sample, the author found significant innovation in most of the textbooks. While two current-traditional rhetorics were among those studied and traditional features play significant roles in several others, most of the texts are informed primarily by recent research and theory. The author found only one of the textbooks to be strictly traditional; the other traditional textbook includes small adaptations of recent scholarship. The innovative textbooks are distinguished by some degree of primary focus on invention, either the discovery of latent knowledge or the making of new knowledge through composing processes. All also develop one or another of the models of the general composing process, although most emphasize the recursive model. The two traditional textbooks exhibit the expected objective epistemology. Of the others, one develops a subjective epistemology (and represents the expressive school of rhetoric) and eight develop transactional epistemologies (one of these is of the classical school, four are cognitivist, and three are epistemic). The author also found interaction between rhetorical schools in most of the textbooks, which indicates that authors are not responding only to current-traditional rhetoric but also to the other rhetorical schools developing in the discipline, indicating further that composition studies is developing as a discourse community.

Recent scholarship in Basic Writing has focused on the tensions created when marginalized students encounter the codes and ritual of higher education (Bartholomae & Petrosky, 1986; Bizzell, 1987). However, little concern has been paid to the role that gender plays in students' accommodation processes, including the nature of the texts they create and of the roles they resist or assume. This observational, exploratory study examines the significance of gender in the responses of two female and two male Mexican-American Basic Writers enrolled in their first college writing class at the University of Arizona in the summer of 1988. In this study I use a phenomenological method of inquiry (Emig, 1981) in examining the students' responses to this course. My analysis takes into account my perspective and the perspectives of the students and their tutor. Additionally, I examine two outside readers' responses to students' essays written immediately before and after the course. I also study global features of these texts using Coe's (1988) discourse matrix. Other data include all the writing the students completed in the course, think-aloud protocols, and extensive interviews with the students and their tutor. In general, the men accommodated themselves more readily than the women to producing the traditional type of expository and argumentive writing taught in the course. They perceived their audience as evaluative and skeptical, and preferred to write impersonal, decontextualized essays. In contrast, the women viewed their audience as receptive and sympathetic, and wrote essays that dealt with their personal contexts and that tended to be narrative and associational. Because only four students were involved in this study, I cannot apply these findings to Basic Writers in general. However, these differences between the men and women in terms of their conceptions of their audience and the types of texts they produced support theories of women's epistemological development (Gilligan, 1982; Belenky et al., 1986). Furthermore, this study highlights the need to validate women's modes of communication and ways of knowing in our classrooms and research.

As a writing placement measure, holistic scoring represents a breakthrough for compositionists and a welcome alternative to more traditional assessments--particularly standardized tests. However, reliability scores from direct measures are inconsistent; and, except for face validity, other types of validity have not been conclusively established. Furthermore, although writing instructions and writing assessment are inextricably related, testing and placing students in composition courses is still chiefly entrusted to administrators and test specialists. As such, the dual tasks are diverted from what should be the instructors' domain, constituting a threat to the empowerment of teachers as competent professionals. The Projective English Placement Instrument (PEPI) was created as part of the effort toward developing assessment tools that are cost-effective, reliable, valid, and that reflect classroom instruction. The PEPI is a 30-item, peer review instrument with a modified holistic/analytic scale which involves the students in identifying and evaluating characteristics that comprise writing quality. A total of 151 entering Freshman English students participated in this study to evaluate the effectiveness of the PEPI. Results indicate that the PEPI is a reliable, valid, accurate, and cost-effective measure of writing proficiency and placement. As a viable option to more conventional but less pedagogically sound methods of testing, such results invite inquiry and application for administrators, instructors, and researchers alike.

Since the classical era of education, the evaluation of written compositions has been an important responsibility of teachers, and written compositions have had some bearing on the ranking of students within both class and institution. In the late nineteenth century, composition-teaching and the ranking of students' work merged in the freshman composition courses in this country. The merger has obscured the controversies attending composition-teaching and ranking, and has contributed to a continuing emphasis on the surface details of writing. Teachers' attitudes about ranking, overlooked by most researchers, reveal a common tendency to emphasize concern for the students' attitude about writing and concern for the student-teacher relationship, above any need or desire to rank. Together their recommendations create consistent criteria that teachers may follow and suggest that ranking does not belong in the freshman composition classroom.

This study was undertaken to explore the motivational factors which influence students who attain valedictorian or salutatorian status. The study employed quantitative data to assess differences between the valedictorian and salutatorian and the top quartile of the class in one school in the Midwest in the categories of absences and test scores and qualitative data based on the interviews of the top two students from the last 19 years to investigate participant's views on intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors. For the quantitative portion of the study, raw data consisting of MPA (Mark Point Average), days absent, and local percentile on standardized achievement tests were collected from students' cumulative record files. The null hypothesis that the mean number of absences for the Valedictorians/Salutatorians and Upper Quartile students was equal was rejected at the.05 level of significance. The null hypothesis that the mean Normal Curve Equivalent test scores for the Valedictorians/Salutatorians and Upper Quartile students were equal was rejected at the.001 level of significance. For the qualitative section, interviews were conducted with the top two students from each of the 19 years of the study. A common coding system was developed, and information was coded using the categories. The protocol included questions on general motivation, parents, teachers, peers, school climate, and personal feelings regarding the attainment of academic success. Additional questions were posed on choice of college, present career, and post-high school motivators. The qualitative section of the research revealed that the high achievers expressed an innate desire to learn and to use their innate drive to get a job done. In addition to intrinsic motivation, extrinsic factors were explored. Parental interest, encouragement, expectations, and the provision of a nurturing home environment were noted. Academic, inspirational, interpersonal, and managerial qualities of teachers were cited. Most high achievers questioned indicated that their friends were academically oriented. In terms of the acceptance aspect of school climate, the population experienced belongingness and nonacceptance. The academic climate was explored, emphasizing praise and reward. Interviewees additionally spoke of their personal feelings when academically successful, post secondary education, career status, and current motivators.

The Carnegie Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents, following two years of in-depth research involving America's middle level education, published in June of 1989 a report, Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century. The report contained eight recommendations for changes in education of early adolescents, identified as those children between the ages of eleven and fifteen years. Since the publication of "Turning Points", no assessment of its impact on the educational system has been completed. On the premise that the success or failure of implementing such sweeping reform hinges on the degree of acceptance of the recommendations by the middle level administrators, this study has been devised to determine the degree of acceptance of the concepts supporting each of the eight recommendations by the middle level principals in Arizona. The study also examined the level of implementation of these notions in Arizona's middle level schools. The data collected from a survey of middle level principals in Arizona revealed the respondents almost universally agreed with the concepts of the recommendations of the Carnegie report, while showing a less than adequate level of implementation of those concepts. The data uncovered no significant relationship between either the degree of acceptance, or implementation of the recommendations of the Carnegie report by middle level school principals in Arizona, and grade level configuration, school size or community size.

This study diagnosed probability awareness and induced greater understanding through combining social organization, probabilistic scenarios, and computer assistance. Third and fifth grade children were the focus of a computer interactive approach that involved fifth graders helping third graders within the Vygotskian concept of Zone of Proximal Development. The computer was used as a mediational means where probabilistic scenarios--classified by their level of difficulty, number of choices and type of probability--were presented to the children and immediate feedback given on their success in approaching the problems. College students were tested using the same scenarios to establish a standard that would be subsequently used to measure children's success. In the pretest all children demonstrated more probabilistic mathematical cognition than verbal ability to express such understanding (50 versus 33 percent of success). The posttest displayed a significant improvement in both experimental groups (one third and one fifth grade). The improvement was both mathematical (success rate moved up 60%) and verbal (54%). The experimental group posttests did not indicate significant differences. The most important finding was that the difference by gender overshadows any credible age structure. All experimental girls' mathematical success rate was almost 70%, approaching closely the college rate of 77%, with third graders doing even better than fifth graders, due to the help received during treatment from both the fifth grade girls and the computer. This provides strong support for the Zone theory. Verbal ability was well over 70%. This gender difference could be interpreted as a structurally developmental factor, but it could also advocate for the need to employ alternative presentation according to gender. Level of difficulty (degree of choices closeness) and types of probability (frequency or proportion) proved to be better indicators of probability awareness than number of choices. The verbal analysis showed a preference for the children to express probability statements in terms of frequency. However, the treatment was successful in eliciting some proportional explanations, demonstrating that a 9-year-old child can entertain and verbalize proportional thoughts. The study concluded that probability assessment and improvement might be more difficult to achieve because of children's verbal limitations than because of their mathematical cognition.

Increasing demands for improving thinking in all facets of society determined the need for this study. Thinkers must be able to improve the quality of their thinking to succeed in a rapidly changing, highly technological world. This study examined thought style as a way of patterning thought, resulting in different qualities. The purpose of this study was to develop a means for thinkers to recognize and select alternative thought styles, by examining steps in the stylization process. Most educational programs to improve thinking do not focus on thinkers' thought patterns. A model is necessary to structure components of thinking patterns, and to orchestrate the steps in the examination of the patterns. The Inquiry Cube model developed by Dr. T. Frank Saunders was used for this purpose in this study. The process of collecting and analyzing data about thought patterns described in this study could be implemented by thinkers. Future plans include adapting this design for an expert system to take advantage of computer aided diagnosis. The Cube model, and the process for analyzing thought patterns described in this study should facilitate collection of information about manifestations of thought style and the development of a computerized system to analyze thought style.

The purpose of this research was to determine whether tasks constructed for interdisciplinary classes reflect the teachers' understandings of the connections in their disciplines or remain the same as when they teach in their original disciplines. Secondary school teachers' perceptions of interdisciplinary teaching and academic tasks form the basis for this qualitative study. Teacher perceptions were gathered through a series of interviews with three teams currently teaching an interdisciplinary American Studies course. The exploration of interdisciplinary teaching and academic tasks in this study was used as a means of (a) discovering differences that teachers perceive between interdisciplinary teaching and teaching in their regular disciplines, (b) identifying the task elements inherent in the interdisciplinary tasks teachers describe, (c) identifying what tasks teachers perceive to be successful and unsuccessful, and (d) discovering how teachers interpret student performance on interdisciplinary tasks. Analyses of the subjects' responses revealed that successful interdisciplinary tasks seem to be related to the teachers' understanding of the connections in the disciplines and that unsuccessful tasks can be used frequently to identity gaps in a teacher's understanding. The findings of this study support the conclusion that interdisciplinary teaching is a complex task in which the teacher must display intellectual, management, and social skills. Teachers are challenged intellectually through the process of determining the connections in their subject matters and of creating materials to bring those connections to their students. Teachers' managerial skills are challenged as they learn to manipulate the double class, establish an appropriate pace, and provide engaging learning experiences. In addition, teachers face social challenges in the creation of a close working relationship with the other team member and a warm learning environment for a large group. The tasks that teachers structure carry the curriculum to their students and convey their present understanding of the combined discipline, one which is regarded as a new discipline by those in the study. As teachers continue to teach this "new discipline," their understandings become more complex and their assignments more truly interdisciplinary.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the patterns of organization and use of microcomputers in Arizona high schools. More specifically, the study was designed to determine the number and types of instructional computing applications being used in Arizona high schools, the level and types of system support for microcomputers, the amount and types of training for faculty and students using microcomputers, the number and types of equipment commonly used, the arrangement and control of microcomputer facilities, and the availability and use by faculty and students. A survey instrument was used to gather data from the target population, which consisted of librarians, principals, and/or computer coordinators from 150 public high schools in Arizona. These three groups were viewed as equivalent sources of information for the purposes of this study. The survey questionnaire was reviewed by a sample of librarians, principals, and computer coordinators for completeness and feasibility. The procedures used for testing the eight hypotheses were (1) Pearson product moment correlation coefficients and (2) frequency distributions. Significant results were found for the analysis of data of one hypothesis. Student use of microcomputers increased with the number of computers available for use by all students. Findings also included information about the most common computing applications, dedicated support for microcomputers, amounts and types of training for faculty and students, and arrangement and use of microcomputers within Arizona high schools. Recommendations for additional investigation were included.