An Examination of Selected Teaching Strategies to Test Their Effectiveness in the Teaching of Writing (Composition, Apprehension)

147 p.Thesis (Educat.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1986.This study examines the effects of the treatment instruction on the writing of simple, clear, and descriptive prose by college students, and examines whether that same type of instruction helps to reduce writing apprehension among those students.The instructor for the control group conducted her classes in the traditional manner. The instructor for the experimental group gave the treatment instruction which included (a) personal writing, (b) journal writing, (c) writing assignments, (d) conferring, and (e) revision. Over a 14-week period, the students in the experimental group did 5 writing assignments. At the end of this period, each of the five assignments was rated by two different raters. Also rated at that time were the first and last writing assignments completed by the students in the control group.Using the ratings from Assignments 1 through 5 (from the experimental group), and the first and last assignments from the control group, t-tests were used to compare: (a) the experimental group and the control group before the instructional period began, (b) growth over time in the experimental group, and (c) how the experimental group and the control group contrasted at the end of the instructional period. In addition, the Writing Apprehension Test (Daly & Miller, 1975) was used to measure the level of the writing apprehension among the students before and after the instructional period. T-tests were used to show the differences between pre- and post-administrations of the test.From the results of the t-tests, the following findings were reported: (a) at the beginning of this study, there was no statistically significant difference in writing between the control group and the experimental group; (b) the students in the experimental group improved in their ability to write simple, clear, and descriptive prose in a 13-week period; (c) the students in the experimental group demonstrated greater improvement in their ability to write simple, clear, and descriptive prose than did students in the control group; (d) the students who received the treatment instruction did not show a statistically significant reduction in writing apprehension; and (e) the students who received traditional instruction did not show a statistical significant reduction in writing apprehension.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD