How Much Writing Do Students Do?
In 2002, the College Board established a high-profile National Commission on Writing, which took as one of its premises that the quality of writing must be improved if students are to succeed in college and in life. In their major policy statement, The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution, the Commission emphasized Tag Heuer Replica Watches the importance of devoting more time to writing instruction, recommending that the amount of time that students spend on writing should be at least doubled, and that writing should be assigned across the curriculum. NAEP provides some interesting data related to this issue, including some indication of trends over time.
One set of questions in NAEP long-term trend data asked students about the kinds of writing that they had done for English class during the previous week (see figs. 3 and 4). In 1988, 42% of 13-year-old students (typically Grade 8) reported having written at least one essay, composition, or theme for English; by 2004, this had increased to 62%. Other types of writing also showed significant increases over this 16-year period, including the percentage of students who had written another kind of report, a letter, a poem, or a story. At age 17 (Grade 12), 62% of the students in 1988 reported having written an essay, composition, or theme in the past week, which increased to 71% by 2004. Reports for other types of writing also tended to show an increase for 17-year-olds, but the changes were significant only for other reports (which rose from 36% to 47%), plays (from 12% to 15%), and poems (from 21% to 30%).Student reports of the types of writing they do “for school” between 2002 and 2007 show a small but significant drop at Grade 8 in the frequency of every type of writing about which students were asked: essays that interpret or analyze (4 percentage points lower for reports of “at least monthly”), letters or essays to persuade others (1 point), a story about personal or imagined experience (3 points), summaries of something read (5 points), observations in a log or journal (3 points), and business writing (e.g., resume or letter to a company; 2 points).
Over the same five-year period, students in Grade 12 reported far fewer changes: persuasive writing and summaries of readings dropped slightly (2 points), while persuasive writing (3 points) and use of logs or journals (2 points) increased slightly. These reports from students are reinforced by teachers’ reports of their instructional Tag Heuer Replica emphases at Grade 8. In both 2002 and 2007, eighth-grade teachers were asked to estimate the percent of time in which their primary instructional focus was on writing, on literary analysis, or on reading skills. Their responses are summarized in Figure 5 and show a small but significant drop in the degree of emphasis on writing, with concomitant increases in the emphasis on the development of reading skills and on literary analysis. (Teacher reports are not available at Grade 12.)
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