CRITICAL REVIEW ESSAY

Critical Review Essay

Critical Review Essay

The heart and core of this paper it to critically analyze three articles which have been critiqued below. Reading is basic in all disciplines, yet training in reading and comprehension is not properly incorporated in many college courses. Some professors hold mistaken assumptions that college textbooks are not significantly different from the common literature and that most college students read academic materials willingly and adequately. On the other hand, some instructors throw out reading re quire ments because they see no effective way to improve students' reading skills. Most detrimental to students, some faculty abandon reading requirements because they perceive their implementation as time-consuming and inconvenient. In some social sciences and humanities courses, for example, students may pass a class without any serious reading of course materials; instead, they write a general topic essay based on their common sense, knowledge, and personal experience.

Training in reading skills requires a change of attitudes, experimentation, and conscientious efforts by college professors. Practical issues can be explored on different fronts. For instance, how much do students need to read in a content course? What do they read? How are reading assignments evaluated? What procedures can be used to ensure that students read assigned materials? How much effort must we invest in teaching reading skills?

High-quality courses are needed in institutions of Higher Education (HE) that both depend on and promote excellence in academic leadership (Smyth, 1997). Graduate students need to be mentored to become competent educational researchers and published writers as a crucial part of the development of their professional identities and careers. This is a controversial position that I have adopted in response to these fundamental areas of concern: 'What are graduate schools of education for?' and 'How might the content of a contemporary curriculum in education be effectively conceptualised to assist graduate students to become prepared as researchers and leaders?'

Academic writing at the graduate level is a complex and often novel undertaking for the student. Indeed, expectations as regards breadth and depth, and the diverse range of writing demands (article critiques, academic papers, grant writing), call for new insights and increased levels of skill. As early as the 1970s, Leming (1977) called for instructional support to prepare graduate students for the rigours of professional survival, and Struck (1976) reported on a course specifically designed to support graduate writing skills. Since then, numerous studies have addressed writing at the undergraduate level (e.g., Hayes & Flower, 1980; Nightingale, 1988; Reed, 1985; Wallace & Hayes, 1991), but the nature of the writing processes at the graduate level has been largely ignored by researchers. The purpose of this study is to develop a psychometric model of graduate writing processes, and a reliable inventory to assess those processes. A new model of graduate writing processes would serve to explain development in writing at that level, and would provide instructional directions. A graduate writing process inventory would help students to understand themselves better as writers in terms of their motives and strategies, ...