Writing in the College Years: Some Indices of Growth

ing, or rather the students' capacities for as revealed in the writing. Since the term, if not the measure, is similar to that used in other studies, it is necessary to define more precisely what we were investigating. First, this instrument must be distinguished from that used by Dilworth et al., who categorized the abstractness of different samples of student writing by evaluating each T-unit according to its degree of abstractness, using three categories: Statements at a low level of are those which make no explicit inferences or judgements. Physical descriptions, statements of objective e paper has made use of some appropriate examples, illustrations, ., ut these are only occasional nd not always relevant or c n316 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.146 on Tue, 23 Aug 2016 04:49:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Writing in the College Years fact and restatements of the literal circumstances of the poem are characteristic of this level. Statements at a high level of are those which propose principles or generalizations concerning life at large. Those T-units not obviously classifiable as either low or high abstractions were tabulated as moderate abstractions.12 The instrument used in our research was radically different in conception. First, it was the discourse as a whole that was categorized, not the individual units (whether sentences or T-units). Each essay was given a global rating with respect to this criterion. Second, this rating was not based on the abstractness of the diction or the abstractness of individual propositions, but rather on the student's capacity to abstract as revealed in the essay: the degree to which the primary data dealt with in the essay had been classified, ordered, and integrated by the writer within some superordinate hierarchic conceptual pattern. The scale was intended to measure the writers' ability to abstract from and conceptualize about their primary material, and for this reason the word abstracting rather than abstraction was used to define the instrument. An essay might indeed sound very abstract, it might consist of many generalizations and abstract propositions, but unless the generalizations grew out of the particulars dealt with in the paper, unless the had been performed by the writer, the essay could not be highly judged according to our scale. The scale was developed from the one used in the Britton et al. research project,13 which was itself based on James Moffett's levels of abstraction.14 The three models are similar and yet different in fundamental ways; Figure 1 highlights some of these contrasts. For Britton and Moffett, the first level of Levels of Abstracting Britton et al. Moffett