In 1985, 66 school districts filed a suit against the Kentucky Department of Education accusing the system of inequitable spending practices. In 1990, the Supreme Court declared the entire educational program unconstitutional, resulting in the Kentucky Education Reform Act or KERA. This new reform movement brought a plethora of changes to school districts across the state including its mode of assessment. KERA introduced new avenues of measuring student progress using writing as the main vehicle to assess content and communication skills. Unfortunately, the majority of Kentucky's high schools showed little improvement in this tested area with only 34% of high schools reaching proficiency in the past twenty years of KERA's existence. In 2009, Kentucky passed into law Senate Bill 1, voiding the previous assessment but increasing the focus on on-demand writing for five grades rather than the three required by KERA. Preempting this new reform was the adoption of the Common Core Standards, which also includes a focus on writing. This consistent attention to writing assessment, and data identifying writing as a major weakness across the Commonwealth, prompted the impetus to examine four schools that achieve high scores in on-demand writing assessment. This qualitative investigation employed a case study design to research these four sites, which represented four different geographic locations in the state. Data sources included observations, interviews, document analysis, and fieldnotes to explore these schools through an interpretivist lens. The collected data were entered into qualitative research software to enable collective coding resulting in distinct categories and resulting themes. Three themes evolved in this cross-case analysis: curriculum, learning culture, and motivation. Teachers from these schools use similar classroom strategies and the learning environments reflect corresponding characteristics. Each school addressed student motivation differently, but the analogous perception of inducing intrinsic and extrinsic student engagement in writing occurred in all four schools. The implications of these results could be overwhelmingly positive as schools seek suggestions to improve writing scores. The findings from this investigation are relevant to the time and may serve as an impetus to improve writing instruction.

While the field technical and professional communication (TPC) has long been concerned with workplace writing and policy writing, few studies have addressed the process of policy writing within an academic context. Using antenarrative and apparent feminism methodologies, this dissertation explores the policy writing process and feminist leadership practices of the DESIGN Committee, a group of women academics who worked to propose new policy to address gender inequity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields for faculty working in their statewide educational system (SES). Employing methods of observation, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection over a period of three years, the researcher sought to answer two research questions: What does the process of policy writing look like for the DESIGN Committee? In what ways do feminist leadership practices, as performed by the committee leader and other committee members, influence the work of the DESIGN Committee? Through the creation of an antenarrative of the DESIGN Committee?s policy work, three important threads stand out: proximity, transparency, and accountability. These threads provide an alternative to the dominant narrative of the committee?s work. In addition, the committee leader?s use of feminist leadership practices, such as creating community, encouraging self-empowerment, and fostering collaboration, impacted the efficiency of the policy writing process. These results point to important factors for future policy writers to consider when composing policy to address diversity, equity, and inclusion or when employing feminist leadership practices.

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In order to provide evidence of the worth of the Summer Institute of the National Writing Project, this study sought to determine whether participation in the professional development would increase feelings of teacher efficacy in writing. The Summer Institute professional development is consistent with recommendations of researchers in teacher efficacy and in professional development. Albert Bandura?s social cognitive theory provides a contextual framework for both teacher efficacy and the Summer Institute. The study compared the pre- and posttest scores on the Teacher Efficacy Scale for Writing and Writing Orientation Scale (Graham, S., Harris, K. R., Fink, B. & MacArthur, C., 2001) reported by 65 teachers participating in the Summer Institute. The study investigated relationships between beliefs about writing and feelings of efficacy. Dependent samples t-tests showed statistically significantly higher posttest scores for personal teaching efficacy t(63) = -5.96, SE = 7.34, p < .001 and for general teaching efficacy t(63) = -2.96, SE = .11, p = .004. Statistically significant higher posttest scores were found in natural learning in teaching writing, t(61) = -4.87, SE = .104, p < .001. No statistically significant differences were found for correctness in teaching writing and explicit instruction in teaching writing. Correlation analysis of posttest mean scores indicated statistically significant correlations between personal teaching efficacy and explicit instruction in writing (r = .419, p = .001) and between mean scores in general teaching efficacy and correctness in writing (r = -.317, p = .012). Results suggest that participation in the Summer Institute could enhance teacher efficacy in writing and increase student performance on writing assessments. The Institute?s focus on process writing seems to be effective in changing teachers? perspectives on writing instruction. Results support a recommendation that types of professional development in which teachers have participated should be used as a source of variance in research on teacher efficacy. Other suggestions include allowing more time to pass before administration of the posttest or a third administration of the instruments to subjects after returning to classrooms and implementing the ideas.

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Engineering educators and industry professionals recognize the need for graduates to be effective communicators, yet the effective teaching of communication remains a persistent contemporary issue, with studies continuing to indicate that engineering graduates are insufficiently prepared for workplace communication. Despite compelling arguments that that writing should be treated as a situated activity, writing instruction is often separated from content instruction within engineering curricula. Even when they are integrated, it is often in a way does not optimally support improvement of students' writing skills. Writing studies scholarship identifies best practices that include treating writing as a process, with pedagogy that includes writing and revising drafts based on feedback and revision. However, writing assignments in engineering courses often not process-oriented. Challenges in addressing this problem include epistemology (i.e. instructors believe that learning to write and learning to engineer are separate skills), self-efficacy (i.e. instructors not feeling qualified to effectively provide feedback or writing instruction), and resources (i.e. inclusion of feedback and revision is unfeasible within key constraints of many engineering courses – limited instructor time and large student-faculty ratios). A potential solution is to use peer feedback, where students provide each other feedback on drafts, which can support a process approach while addressing these challenges. Research outside engineering has demonstrated that peer feedback can be as or more effective than instructor feedback; to bring that work into engineering, this study examines peer feedback in the context of a first-year engineering course through a quasi-experimental intervention in which feedback and revision were incorporated into an existing assignment using several variations of peer feedback. Interventions included two types of feedback training as well as feedback from single peers and multiple peers. Results support peer feedback in this context: it was statistically indistinguishable from instructor feedback when students were given sufficient instruction. Feedback from multiple peers, in fact was more effective than instructor feedback in improving writing quality, and in-class instruction was more effective than a handout only in helping students provide effective feedback. However, some general feedback recommendations – notably that readerly feedback should be encouraged directive feedback discouraged – were not supported. While writing studies literature encourages feedback that takes the position of the reader, readerly peer feedback reduced revision quality in this study. Directive feedback, on the other hand, caused improvements in writing quality, supporting previous hypotheses that the tightly-constrained genres in which engineers write justify more use of directive feedback. / Ph. D.