This investigation sought normative longitudinal change in student writing during college. It used a random sample of students (N= 64), each of whom had produced essays at two points in their undergraduate careers, matriculation and junior year. Measures were writing features showing undergraduate change toward competent, working-world performance. From a principal-components factoring of variables used in a previous study, nine measures were selected as good representatives of nine factors—factors of independent and bound ideas, idea elaboration and substantiation, local cohesion, establishment of logical boundaries, free modification, fluency, and vocabulary. When applied to the 1st-year and junior-year writing, eight of the nine measures, including a holistic rating, recorded statistically significant change, all in the direction of workplace performance. Directions for further research are discussed.

This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two professional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of scholarship. That scholarship is defined as RAD: replicable, aggregable, and data supported. The history of RAD scholarship as published in NCTE and CCCC books and journals, compared to that published elsewhere, is traced from 1940 to 1999 in three areas: teaching of the research paper, gain in writing skills during a writing course, and methods of peer critique. The history of NCTE and CCCC attempts at scholarly bibliography is also traced. Implications are considered for the future of the study of college composition as an academic discipline.

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