| The purpose of the study was to determine if the introduction of Rogerian argumentation based on Carl Rogers' psychological principles and cooperative learning would affect students' writing performance and attitudes toward writing. Participants included the members of four, intact freshman composition classes. All students received the same instruction for the first seven weeks of the semester which focused on traditional, classical argumentative writing. During the following eight weeks each of the four groups received a different treatment. Two groups continued to write classical arguments, but one of these two groups wrote within a cooperative environment. The other two groups wrote Rogerian arguments, but one of these Rogerian groups wrote their arguments in a cooperative environment.; Writing performance was assessed using holistic scoring methods. Prewriting argumentative essays were statistically compared to postwriting argumentative essays to determine variance. Also, students completed a WASS attitude questionnaire before and after the treatment.; The results of the data indicate the classical group demonstrated a better performance than the Rogerian group while all other groups remained about the same. No distinctions were determined among student attitudes toward writing. Also, student epistemological assumptions were tested to determine if correlations existed between their epistemological maturity, their writing performance and their attitudes. No positive correlations were found to exist.; Although further quantitative studies need to be conducted, the data suggest that the quality of student writing may significantly increase when students write traditional, classical arguments as opposed to writing Rogerian arguments. Furthermore, although a considerable number of studies in the literature indicate that cooperative learning enhances student performance, this study failed to confirm that cooperative learning improves student performance in the context of argumentative writing. |
