The effects of content knowledge on the organization and supporting detail in high school students' expository writing

With the widespread acceptance of the process approach to writing in recent decades, much research has been conducted on the procedural knowledge writers use. However, limited formal investigation has been conducted on the role of content knowledge in writing. The presence or absence of content knowledge may in fact affect the quality of writing. Further, various writing assessments, ranging from teacher grading of writing to formal assessments, typically include the traits of organization and detail in arriving at a score. However, these scores reflect only the quality of the finished written product, without account of the writing process through which the writer produced it.; This study, then, examined whether differences in one factor in the writing process, specifically the amount of the writer's content knowledge of the writing topic, are associated with different levels of quality of the finished written product, specifically in terms of organization and detail. Two research questions were posed: First, do high school students' expository essays written on topics for which they have more content knowledge differ in organization from those written on topics for which they have less content knowledge? Second, do high school students' expository essays written on topics for which they have more content knowledge differ in detail from those written on topics for which they have less content knowledge?; Three classes of Advanced Placement English students, consisting of high school juniors and seniors, comprised the participant sample. These participants were given two content knowledge assessments, one on an expected high knowledge topic (William Shakespeare) and one on an expected low knowledge topic (Edward Albee). All participants then wrote two essays in response to similar prompts, one each on Shakespeare and Albee. The essays of participants scoring both above a pre-determined number of correct answers on the high knowledge assessment and below a pre-determined number of correct answers on the low knowledge assessment were scored according to analytic rubrics for organization and supporting detail. Repeated measures ANOVA results indicated statistically reliable differences in the scores for both organization and detail between the high and low content knowledge topic essays.