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Researchers who study the writing process have found that beginning writers do little spontaneous revising of their own texts. This study explores the possibility that beginning writers do not revise because they do not read their own writing. The assumption behind the study is that explicit selfquestioning strategies would engage young writers in reading their texts; thus they would become more active revisers. The experimental intervention is a question-prompt computer program (added to a word processing program) that guides the 11 to 16-year-old subjects to examine their own writing by asking themselves questions about their texts. This process was intended to engage the subjects in reading the text closely and revising more extensively. Analyses of the number and nature of revisions indicate that self-reflective question-prompts engage students in reading their texts and lead to significant changes in revising strategy. BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE

In response to a number of difficulties many beginners exhibit in trying to master a programming language such as BASIC or LOGO, a “metacourse” was developed to be integrated into a teacher's normal course materials as an enriching “vitamin shot.” The metacourse in BASIC consists of mental models, problem-solving strategies, key concepts, and other structures that may help students to understand more deeply and wield more artfully the knowledge they are acquiring during their regular instruction in BASIC. Highly encouraging results, in terms of increased mastery of BASIC, were found in two large scale empirical studies conducted in a number of high school BASIC programming classes. Metacourse classes exhibited improved performance on a variety of BASIC programming tasks, ranging from comprehension of simple commands to debugging and production of small programs. This same pattern was observed with interventions which offered teachers considerable support (Study 1), or the minimal support more typical of “normal” classroom conditions (Study 2).

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