"1. What relationship exists between writing quality and varying degrees of information about the writing prompt with respect to topic, purpose, and audience?The study found each age groups uses different rhetorical considerations in unique ways. These findings have implications for designing and using prompts in teaching and evaluating writing done by students at different ages.
2. What relationship exists between students' age level, writing quality, and amount of information in the prompt?"(428)
The author establishes the long-held importance for writers to be able to construct writing based on rhetorical situation or discursive task, but identifies a problem, "...writers who do not clearly understand the rhetorical question, or see only part of it within the assignment, often cannot solve the rhetorical problem." Students struggling with this issue may have their writing assessed negatively when the problem is not with their ability to write, but with the assignment. This the study isolates purpose, topic, and audience, as examples of areas with specific problems. Students need a great deal of information around a "topic" to write effectively about it. "Audiences" are a problem because of ambiguity. Is the audience real or imagined? How accurately can a 15 year old construct the demands of a fictitious audience of adults? Other developmental problems accompany "purpose." Recognizing this problem seems astute to me. The author establishes the problem with a range of disciplines from Rhetoric and Composition to Developmental Psychology. The study was well conceived and applied. They evaluated four age groups, each producing over a 125 essays. The students were all from "...advanced English classes in an affluent community in Central Texas," and college students from a "flagship campus of the state's university system, having graduated from high schools comparable to that of the high school students in the study."(430) The evaluations were done by four high school english teachers called "raters". The use of advanced students rules out variations based on lack of ability. While the studies differ in focus a clear connection between quality and complexity of writing to the use of "rhetorical" prompts is consistent with the study by Butcher and Kintsch, and the study by Kozma. My interest is in understanding how much rhetorical situation is effecting outcomes of Christian testimonies composed using prompts.
The method employed to study these research questions was to have 624 students write essays to one prompt taken from a writing proficiency test given to juniors in a California University. The was made less abstract for younger writers. The prompt was further modified for the study:
"Eight combinations were created to include more or less information in the assignment. Assignment #1 (T+P+A+) contains the most specific information about all three variables topic, purpose and audience while assignment #8 (T-P-A-) contains the least specific information about all three variables."(429)After administering the 8 different prompts to students in a way designed to maximize participation but minimize stress, the essays were scored by four "raters" for trained to grade and given a rubric. Each paper was graded on a 0-6 scale twice and any paper with too large a margin of difference in grade was assessed a third time. The results were coded and evaluated by age group along two axis one being grade(0 to 6) and one being level of complexity (T- to T+, A- to A+, and P- to P+). These results were recorded for each age group both graphically and as a statistical analysis of variance. I found the graphical representation easier to quickly digest and the statistical presentation more precise. The findings show topic and audience consideration are the most difficult to evaluate and that their effect was largely on the higher level 11th graders and freshman. The author speculates this is a result of more training in use of these rhetorical effects. These students reacted to strong audience and topic prompts and weak ones, but not mixed. Seventh graders did better with less specific topic prompts. Ninth graders did better with more specific. All benefitted from more specificity on purpose. The author clearly demonstrates a rise in the ability to use specific rhetorical prompts that coincides with the age and education of the writer and generates positive implications and suggestions in the pedagogical areas of teaching and assessing young writers. The paper is well written, the use of charts and graphs effective (even when dealing with multiple variables) and the appendixes were complete; including examples of different prompts using different combinations of A,T and P, holistic grading guides, and examples of student work. All together it makes an effective argument for considering age and development when designing and applying prompts using rhetorical situations.
