Edited by Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Duane Roen

Since the 1980s, even as international writing scholars have embraced cognitive science, the number of studies building on research in writing and cognition has decreased in the United States. Despite this decline, significant interest and ongoing research in this critical area continues. This collection explores the historical context of cognitive studies, the importance to our field of studies in neuroscience, the applicability of habits of mind, and the role of cognition in literate development and transfer. 

Edited by Susan H. McLeod, David Stock, and Bradley T. Hughes

As Barbara L'Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo have demonstrated in Historical Studies on Writing Program Administration (2004), the work of administering a writing program began long before a title accompanied the work. Because little was published in the early years about WPA work as such, recovering information from unpublished sources becomes paramount to understanding the early period of the profession. The materials here—a memoir, an oral history, and an out-of-print pamphlet on assessing writing—give us important information about writing program administration at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from just after World War II up until the early 1980s. During that long period, the writing program was overseen by just two women, first Ednah Shepherd Thomas and then Joyce Steward, allowing for remarkable continuity through some turbulent times.

By Joanne Addison and Sharon James McGee

In Writing and School Reform, Joanne Addison and Sharon James McGee respond to a testing and accountability movement that has imposed increasingly stronger measures of control over our classrooms, shifted teaching away from best practices, and eroded teacher and student agency. Drawing on historical and empirical research, Writing and School Reform details the origins of the accountability movement, explores its emerging effects on the teaching of writing, and charts a path forward that reasserts the agency of teachers and researchers in the field. 

By Nathan Shepley

In Placing the History of College Writing, Nathan Shepley argues that pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing's physical, social, and discursive surroundings. Even if the immediate outcome of student writing is to generate academic credit, Shepley shows, the writing does more complex rhetorical work. 

Edited by Terry Myers Zawacki and Michelle Cox

This edited collection pursues the ambitious goal of including within WAC theory, research, and practice the differing perspectives, educational experiences, and voices of second-language writers. The editors and authors not only report new research but also share a wealth of pedagogical, curricular, and programmatic practices relevant to second-language writers