The Effects of Available Information on Responses to School Writing Tasks.

This study investigated the relationships between topic-specific background knowledge and measures of overall quality, coherence, syntactic complexity, audience, and function in expository writing. Ninetyseven students from four tenth grade American history classes completed two essays at different points during the semester. Findings from analyses of their papers suggest a strong and consistent relationship between topic specific background knowledge and writing quality. More interesting, however, is the evidence that different kinds of knowledge are predictive of success in different writing tasks. In general, students whose knowledge of a topic was relatively well organized did better on teacher-developed topics requiring them to compare and contrast relevant issues, while students whose knowledge base was more extensive (but not necessarily well-organized) did better on assignments that presented a thesis and required them to provide supporting evidence. Shifts in audience and function were also related to the kinds of knowledge students' had about the topics on which they were writing. During the past ten years, an increasing amount of research has focused on the nature of composing and the variables that affect the writing process. Stages of writing have been identified and described (Emig, 1971; Flower & Hayes, 1980), the functions of writing have been examined (Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod, & Rosen, 1975; Applebee, 1981); early writing development has been studied (Bissex, 1980; Graves, 1975; Harste, Burke, Sc Woodward, 1982) and composing aloud techniques have been used to gain a window on the composing strategies used by more and less facile writers (Flower & Hayes, 1980; Perl, 1979). During this same period, research has also focused on how personal history and specific life experiences affect the construction of meaning (Anderson, 1977; Goodman & Goodman, 1978; Harste, Burke, & Woodward, 1982; Rumelhart, 1977) and how the ways in which people organize their past experiences affect their responses to new experiences. Unfortunately, this vein of research has tended to be limited to relationships between background knowledge and reading comprehension while the effects of topic knowledge on written expression have tended to be ignored. While writing researchers have generally assumed that knowledge of a topic affects The research reported here was supported in part by grant number NIE-G-0156 from the National Institute of Education. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 18, No. 1, February 1984