Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 29, Issue 1, 1995

This essay examines English teaching practices in American rural schools from 1900-1940, with a special emphasis on rural schools in Iowa. The essay begins with an overview of rural education, focusing first on the “rural school problem” of the early 20th century and going on to discuss the Country Life Movement, a movement that proposed significant reforms for rural education and rural living. A survey of English teaching practices undertaken in the spirit of the Country Life Movement completes the descriptive text. The essay concludes with an assessment of the Country Life Movement and a discussion of its implications for current educational reform in American schools.

A newly developed instrument, the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ), provides scales that measure seven different aspects of readers’ orientation toward literary texts: Insight, Empathy, Imagery Vividness, Leisure Escape, Concern with Author, Story-Driven Reading, and Rejection of Literary Values. The present report presents evidence that each of these scales possesses satisfactory internal consistency, retest reliability, and factorial validity. Also, a series of five studies provided preliminary evidence that each scale may be located in a theoretically plausible network of relations with certain global personality traits (e.g., Absorption), with aspects of cognitive style (e.g., Regression in the Service of the Ego), and with some of the learning skills that are relevant to effective work in the classroom (e.g., Elaborative Processing). In a variety of teaching and research settings, the LRQ may be a useful measure of individual differences in readers’ orientation toward literary texts.

More and more college campuses are offering one or another form of “writing-intensive” classes across the curriculum. This study investigates what students perceive to be the effects of the writing-intensive requirement at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where students are required to take five courses designated as writing-intensive. To identify the potential composite effects of taking three or more writing-intensive classes and to identify evidence of learning that may have resulted from these multiple experiences, we interviewed 82 randomly selected seniors. Using interview transcriptions, we developed a scheme for analysis of the data. These analyses revealed several areas of self-identified improvement associated with writing-intensive classes: writing skills, knowledge acquisition, and problem-solving abilities. Students also reported that they had become better writers through interaction with their professors during the writing process, although they also reported wanting to better understand the philosophy behind writingacross- the-curriculuma nd the purposes of specific assignments. These student-reported effects of writing-intensive classes support the notion that writing can play an important part in learning.

This study investigated the effects of writing models on students’ writing of research texts. The models used by participants varied in quality and in labeling cues. Ninety-five psychology majors were given basic facts, including relevant and irrelevant information, for writing a Method Section for one of two experiments. The control group (N = 22) saw no models. The models groups (N =73) saw three student-written Method sections—either 3 good models (AAA) or 1 good, 1 moderate, and 1 poor model (ABC). Half of each quality group saw the models labeled with grades; the other half saw them unlabeled. Following holistic ratings of the students’ texts, the texts were analyzed for content. The models groups’ texts were rated as better organized than those of the control group. The models also influenced text content. Seeing a proposition in the models increased the likelihood that students would include it in their texts, with the effect being smaller for propositions that appeared only in moderate or poor models. For the writing topic deemed more difficult, the models group included more topical information than the control group, including more essential propositions but also more unnecessary propositions. No systematic benefits emerged from labeling the models or from providing only good models. Students seemed able to judge the relative quality of the models, even without labels. Overall, providing models seems to increase the salience of the topical information considered by student writers for inclusion in their texts