The relationship between teachers' attitudes to the teaching of writing and whole-language/skills-based philosophies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigated teachers' attitudes towards four specific strands isolated from views propounded in recent literature and research on the teaching of written composition. Much discussion in this field has focused on a "new paradigm" in that educators and researchers alike have come to view writing from a new perspective. Certain aspects of this new perspective on the teaching of writing appear to be shared by various sources in the literature. From this body of writing the researcher identified and isolated four distinct, though interwoven, shared values or "strands." These concerned Control on the part of the student-writer, Respect for what the student-writer has to say in his or her writing, Sharing the writing process, and Learning from writing by using writing as a tool for learning. A questionnaire was constructed to probe teachers' attitudes to each of these strands. Two sample populations, one with a whole-language and one with a non-integrated orientation towards teaching language, were identified. Twenty-five teachers from each population answered a three-part questionnaire. The main body of the survey probed attitudes to each of the strands. T-test results indicate that, while the whole-language oriented group reacted more favorably to all four strands in general, statistically this was highly significant in only two of the strands. That is, CONTROL on the part of the writer, and SHARING the writing process as in a community of writers appeared to be valued more highly amongst teachers with a whole-language orientation. This suggests that there may be a relationship between a whole-language orientation and these two aspects of teaching writing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".