The document summarizes a study that analyzed 22 academic essays written by Open University students in the UK. The study aimed to understand how students use source texts to write essays. It mapped the order that novel concepts were introduced in the student essays against the order in the source textbooks. It found high correlations between 0.8 and 0.98, demonstrating students closely imitated the argument structure of the source texts. This suggests students used a form of "imitative problem solving" when writing essays, relying heavily on the structure and content of the source materials provided.

1. Academic essay writing as imitative problem solving: examples
from distance learning
Sydney Ian Robertson*
Department of Psychology, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK
Students in tertiary education are often faced with the prospect of writing an
essay on a topic they know nothing about in advance. In distance learning insti-
tutions, essays are a common method of assessment in the UK, and specified
course texts remain the main sources of information the students have. How do
students use a source text to construct an essay? The present paper presents a
methodology for mapping the source text on to the finished student essay. The
underlying assumption is that students are using a form of imitative problem
solving when faced with the complex task of writing an essay. Twenty-two
essays written by Open University students in the UK, based on three different
questions, were analysed on the basis of the order in which novel concepts were
introduced and the extent to which this order mirrored that of the source text-
book. Correlations were then carried out between the structure of the essay, the
structure of the source text and the eventual grade awarded. The average
correlation for all three essays and source texts was 0.8, with some individual
essays having a correlation of 0.98, demonstrating that the students were closely
imitating the argument structure of the source text.
Keywords: imitative problem solving; essay writing; reading for writing;
distance learning
Introduction
Students in secondary and tertiary education are often faced with the difficult
problem solving task of writing an extended piece of prose about a subject they
initially know nothing about. In an introductory psychology course, for example,
they may be told that in several weeks’ time, they have to write an essay comparing
and contrasting some aspect of the developmental theories of Piaget and Vygotsky.
Many students will never have heard of either nor will they know what a theory of
development looks like. What do they do to solve this problem?
Students are not left in a vacuum: in higher education institutions they have
access to libraries; there are recommended textbooks, lectures, seminars, on-line
material and so on, that will cover the topic they have to write about to a greater or
lesser extent. Before students had widespread access to the internet, those taking a
distance learning course often had limited access to sources other than the pre-
scribed textbooks and other information sent to them and it often remains the case
that students at the Open University in the UK have a main textbook on a particular
topic supplemented by audio-visual and on-line material. In designing courses that
*Email: ian.robertson@beds.ac.uk
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2014
Vol. 39, No. 3, 263–274, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.822846
Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

2. use essays (term papers) as part of an assessment strategy, it would be extremely
useful to know how students as novice writers make use of source texts to generate
the eventual essay; essays based on a single textbook may allow us to ascertain the
basic underlying processes students use to write from unfamiliar source material.
This paper presents a methodology for examining the use made of a single source
text, with the aim of understanding some of the cognitive processes used in reading
for writing.
Research on student writing
Writing in academic contexts involves an interaction between cognitions, the
content, the genre, writing strategies and the student’s conception of the writing
process (Beauvais, Olive, and Passerault 2011; Butcher and Kintsch 2001; Flower
and Hayes 1981; Hayes 1989; Hayes and Flower 1986; Lavelle and Zuercher 2001;
McCutchen et al. 1994). Researchers have examined students’ writing from a range
of perspectives, such as the strategies students tend to use, the underlying cognitive
processes involved and the analysis of source texts. Entwistle (1995), for example,
examined the different approaches undergraduate students use in their essay writing
and in examination preparation. His study is built on the taxonomy of approaches
to studying by Marton and Säljö (1976), who categorised learners as employing
either a ‘deep’ approach or a ‘surface’ approach to learning. A surface approach
includes an intention to memorise information without integrating it with previous
knowledge. A deep approach involves trying to understand the meaning of the
learning material, particularly by relating it to previous knowledge. Entwistle added
a strategic approach to these, whereby the student assesses the requirements of the
assessment in terms of either a predominantly factual approach (hence relatively
superficial) or a procedural approach (likely to reflect a deep approach).
While these approaches tend to focus on the source material used in writing,
Torrance, Thomas, and Robinson (2000) describe four other factors influencing stu-
dents’ writing ability. These are: familiarity with the content, familiarity with the
genre, ability to manage the interaction between content and written expression and
an over-arching writing strategy that provides a framework for writing. In the con-
text of the present study, we are assuming that the student writer is unfamiliar with
the content. Moreover, there may be individual variations in terms of familiarity
with the genre, but most students studying a topic for the first time are likely to be
relatively unfamiliar with that too. As a result, managing the interaction between
the content and written expression may be difficult, particularly if the students come
from different backgrounds, such as science and arts, and are faced with writing in
an unfamiliar genre, which can often be the case in such institutions as the Open
University (North 2005; Read, Francis, and Robson 2001).
The impact of cognitive processes on writing strategies
The writing strategies students use depend on the cognitive processes they bring to
bear. Cognitive activities such reading source texts, generating text, translating writ-
ing plans into sentences, reading the assignment brief, etc., rely on more basic
underlying cognitive processes (working memory, memory retrieval, mental repre-
sentation, etc.) in a limited capacity information processing system. The early influ-
ential focus on the cognitive aspects of writing by Flower and Hayes (Flower and
264 S.I. Robertson

3. Hayes 1981; Hayes and Flower 1980), particularly with their view of the writer as
‘a thinker on full time cognitive overload’ (Flower and Hayes 1980, 33), has
strongly influenced our understanding of the writing process and how it can be
studied.
One way for novice writers to reduce the cognitive load is to use a source text
as an example to help write the essay. Given that most students are required to
write based on what they have learned or understood from textbooks, the processes
involved in using a source to solve a target problem (writing an essay) come in to
play (Gentner 1983; Gick and Holyoak 1980, 1983; Holyoak and Thagard 1995).
Nash, Schumacher, and Carlson (1993) used Gentner’s (1983) structure-mapping
model as a basis for studying students’ essay writing. Their study looked at essays
based on two passages with two different organisations (topical and chronological).
The passages were either organised similarly to each other or differently. Students
wrote a compare-and-contrast-type essay based on the passages. An analysis of the
essays showed that the students treated the first passage they read as the ‘base’ (or
‘source’) and the second as the ‘target’, and imposed the structure of the base onto
the target. They argued that Gentner’s model was a useful way of conceptualising
how the writers use multiple sources.
The present paper also treats essay writing from sources as a form of analogical
problem solving. Given that there is only one text as the base or source in the pres-
ent study, the student’s final essay itself becomes the target. More specifically, the
view taken here is that novice writers use a sub-type of analogical problem solving
called imitative problem solving (Robertson 2000; Robertson and Kahney 1996). In
analogical problem solving, solvers need to be able to retrieve a relevant source
example usually from long-term memory (LTM). The example in this case is the
source problem – i.e. the textbook author’s solution to the problem of explaining
the new material. This is then adapted to solve a current (target) problem (writing
an essay on a given topic).
However, in imitative problem solving, the student does not necessarily have an
example in LTM that can be called upon. In the case of students given an essay to
write on a topic they know nothing about, there may be little relevant knowledge at
all in LTM, either about the topic, the genre or the relevant rhetorical structure; so,
one obvious course of action for the student is to use the content and structure pro-
vided by the source text, since it provides a solution to the problems that faced the
textbook writer; that is: how to present new concepts to students, how much
background knowledge can be assumed, how much can they be expected to have
understood from previous chapters and so on.
The aims of the essay writer, however, are not, or should not be, the same.
Indeed, one would expect that different essay questions should dictate different
organisations of the resulting essay. Nevertheless, the assumption of this paper is
that novice writers will not only use the content of the textbook, but also often use
the superficial structure of the source text, however irrelevant that may be to the
argument implied in the essay question. If the students are using imitation as
the basis for using a source text, then we would expect a high correlation between
the superficial structure of the students’ essays and the structure of the source text,
as measured by the order in which new concepts appear.
Given the research on deep and surface processing and on the categories of
essay structure, it would seem that a high correlation between the structure of the
source text and the structure of the essay would suggest a degree of surface
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 265

4. processing of the material. Students who have understood the source text well
would be more likely to adapt the source text to answer the specific essay question.
The grades given to those essays should, therefore, reflect the difference between
deep and surface processing, as well as the extent to which the student ends up
plagiarising (whether intentionally or not). That is, we would expect a negative
correlation between the essay/text structure correlations and the essay grades.
Method and analysis
To compare the structure of the source text with the structure of the essay (the tar-
get), the content of the source text is analysed in terms of the order in which novel
concepts first appear. Table 1 gives the order in which concepts appear for the first
time in Roth and Bruce (1995, 19–68), and Table 2 shows the order of concepts in
Kahney (1993, 15–77). These concepts form the horizontal dimension of a matrix
as shown in the example in Figure 1.
The Roth and Bruce textbook, in common with many psychology textbooks,
often use a chronological organisation to discuss the historical development of
ideas. The book begins by discussing the representation of concepts in terms of the
‘defining features’ view (the set of features a concrete or abstract object must have
to be classed as an example of a conceptual category), followed by a discussion of
the ‘typical features’ view (concepts are categorised according to their typicality),
which in turn precedes the ‘exemplar’ view (concepts are best understood in terms
of examples of the category) and so on. As a result, the structure can be described
as ‘depth-first’, since one topic is gone into in some depth before moving to the
next topic.
Table 1. Order in which concepts appear in Roth and Bruce (1995, 19–68) perception and
representation.
1. Conceptual
categories
2. Concepts 3. Mental
representations
4. Categorisation
5. Class 6. Classification 7. Cognitive economy 8. Representations
9. Processes 10. Concept
acquisition
11. Defining features
approach
12. Thought
experiment
13. Property 14. Feature 15. Formal property 16. Necessary and
sufficient
17. External
specification
18. Superordinate
categories
19. Subordinate
categories
20. Hierarchy
21. Instances 22. Exemplars 23. Inheritance 24. Nodes
25. Sentence
verification
26. Taxonomy 27. Functional property 28. Typicality
29. Internal
structure
30. Typicality rating 31. Demand
characteristics
32. Context effects
33. Fuzzy
boundaries
34. Prototype 35. Typical features
model
36. Exemplar model
37. Mixed
approaches
39. Cue validity 40. Family
resemblance
41. Structural
description
41. Primitives 42. Basic level 43. Expert knowledge 44. Dual
representation
45. Conceptual
core
46. Real essence 47. Taxonomic
categories
48. Goal-directed
categories
49. Ad hoc
categories
50. Conceptual
combination
51. Stable
representations
52. Event frames
266 S.I. Robertson

5. The Kahney text is not chronological in structure but covers a number of topics
in succession (problem structures, transfer problems, information processing models,
cognitive modelling and analogical problem solving). It, therefore, provides a con-
trasting organisation to the Roth and Bruce text.
Participants
Students in three Open University tutorial classes over two years were asked if they
were willing to allow their essays to be analysed after a mark had been awarded.
Table 2. Order in which concepts appear in Kahney (1993, 15–77) problem solving:
current issues.
1. Goal 2. Problem solving 3. PS & solver
interaction
4. Transformation
problems
5. Problem
categorisation
6. Educational
practice: PS
strategies
7. Tower of Hanoi 8. Protocols
9. Toy worlds –
scale up
10. Well-defined and
ill-defined
11. Well-defined 12. IGOR
13. Ill-defined 14. Givens 15. Augment
givens from
LTM
16. Problem structure
17. Surface and
structural
features
18. Cover stories 19. State space
analysis
20. Isomorphic and
homomorphic
21. Chinese Tea
Ceremony
22. Isomorphic
problems
23. Missionaries
and Cannibals
24. Jealous Husbands
25. Homomorphic
problems
26. Analysis of PS 27. Problem
representation
28. Individual diffs. in
representation
29. Mutilated
Checkerboard
30. Move and change
problems
31. Transfer 32. Positive and
negative transfer
33. IP models 34. Task environment 35. Knowledge
states
36. Problem space
37. Mental
operations
38. Memory 39. WM 40. Chunks
41. LTM 42. Dots and squares
problem
43. Rule learning 44. Heurisitcs
45. Algorithms 46. Means-ends
analysis
47. GPS 48. Water and
electricity
Figure 1. Example analysis of an essay based on Roth and Bruce (1995).
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 267

6. They were informed that all identifying marks (names, ID numbers, etc.) would be
stripped from the essay prior to being analysed; as a result, there is no information
about the participants other than that they were typical of Open University students
at that time (aged between 30 and 65 from a variety of backgrounds and occupa-
tions, and the majority were female).
Essays
To remove potential sources of bias in assessing the essays (Diederich, French, and
Carlton 1961; Hartley et al. 2006; Read, Francis, and Robson 2005), all were refor-
matted so that they were similar in appearance. Spelling errors and gross grammati-
cal errors were corrected and there was no indication of names, gender, ethnic
group, etc. All essays were rewritten in 11 point Times New Roman font, double
spaced and with large margins – 2.54 cm on the left and 3.21 cm on the right – as
these appear to influence grades (Hartley et al. 2006).
Essays based on three essay titles were analysed and are reported here. One title
was: ‘Compare and contrast defining feature and typical feature approaches to con-
cept representation’ (Essay 1). Eleven essays on this topic were analysed using the
matrix. The second was ‘Describe the difficulties of Rosch’s earlier models of cate-
gorisation. Do the later models overcome these problems?’ (Essay 2). Only four of
these essays were submitted and analysed. The third essay was: ‘Give some exam-
ples of problem structures and problem solving methods. To what extent does the
analysis of problem solving structures help us to understand the transfer of problem
solving skills?’ (Essay 3). Seven essays on this topic were analysed.
For each essay, the students were given brief advice about what section of the
main text to look at in preparation for the essay, and also pointed to a section in
the Eysenck and Keane (2000) textbook on cognitive psychology. Essay 1 was
graded by two markers who were unfamiliar with the original text, but who were
experienced at marking undergraduate essays in psychology. Where there were dis-
agreements, the markers considered the essays as a group and came to an agreed
mark. The reason for using markers unfamiliar with the text was to get some indi-
cation of the perceived quality of the essays uncontaminated, as it were, by knowl-
edge of the original source text. The third set of essays (Essay 3) was marked by
markers who were familiar with the text, with the aim of determining how the
closeness to the original text might affect the overall grade. Because of the small
number of essays, the second set of essays (Essay 2) was not graded, but was ana-
lysed to determine the correlation between the essay and the source text.
The vertical axis in Figure 1 is numbered indicating the order in which concepts
appear in the student’s essay. The matrix was then used to map and compare the
order of concepts in both the source and target. One can then obtain a correlation
between the order of appearance of concepts in the text and in the essay. Three
examples of the conceptual categories essays are shown in Figures 1–3. In Figure 1,
the student appears to have kept very close to the structure of the original text. In
Figure 2, there is a low correlation between the structure of the essay (based on the
order of the concepts) and the structure of the text. In this particular case, the essay
received a reasonably high mark (equivalent to a B+). Figure 3 also shows a low
correlation. However, in this case the grade was low.
The same procedure was followed for the other essay questions based on the
problem solving textbook. Finally, the correlations obtained in the essay analysis
were correlated in turn with the grade awarded to the essay.
268 S.I. Robertson

7. Results
The correlations between the essay and text structure are shown in Table 3. Overall,
the correlations were very high for all essay questions, with an average of 0.8
for the conceptual categories essays and 0.83 for the problem solving essays. The
correlation between the essay/text correlations and the essay grades was low and
positive for the conceptual categories essays, but high and negative for the problem
solving essays. Figures 4 and 5 show examples from the problem solving essays,
where there is a high text/essay correlation, one that was awarded a low grade and
one with a high grade.
Columns two, five and eight in Table 3, show the correlation between the struc-
ture of the source text and that of the individual essays based on the order in which
novel concepts appear. Column three is the grade for each conceptual categories
essay and column six shows the grades for the problem solving essays. To find out
if the correlations between the essay and textbook structures relate to the grades
given, these two sets of figures can be analysed in turn to see if there is a correla-
tion between them. The figures on the bottom row show these correlations. Overall,
the hypothesis that there would be a negative correlation between the correlations
and grades was not completely supported. Given that there are only four essays on
the second conceptual categories essay (Essay 2), correlations between the grades
and the structure would not be meaningful. The correlations are presented as they
Figure 2. Example of a ‘good’ essay with a low correlation between the order of concepts
in the essay and the order of concepts in the text.
Figure 3. Example of a ‘poor’ essay with a low correlation between the order of concepts
in the essay and the order of concepts in the text.
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 269

8. Table 3. Correlations between essay structure and text structure (conceptual categories
essay).
Conceptual
categories
essay 1
R
source/
target Grade
Problem
solving
essay
R
source/
target Grade
Conceptual
categories
essay 2
R
source/
target
CC1.1 0.76 9 PS1-1 0.98 3 CC2.1 0.96
CC1.2 0.97 12 PS1-2 0.87 2 CC2.2 0.50
CC1.3 0.51 11 PS1-3 0.88 6 CC2.3 0.93
CC1.4 0.86 10 PS1-4 0.83 12 CC2.4 0.82
CC1.9 0.97 11 PS1-5 0.75 13
CC1.6 0.67 10 PS1-6 0.90 11
CC1.7 0.81 10 PS1-7 0.60 15
CC1.8 0.72 11
CC1.5 0.65 7
CC1.10 0.92 8
CC1.11 0.98 10
Mean Rcc
0.80 Mean Rps
0.83 Mean Rcc2
0.80
Correlation
Rcc
/gradecc
0.17 Correlation
Rps
/gradeps
0.76
Figure 4. Example of a ‘poor’ problem solving essay with a high correlation (0.98).
Figure 5. Example of a ‘good’ problem solving essay with a high correlation (0.83).
270 S.I. Robertson

9. suggest that the essay title is irrelevant to the use the students make of the source
text.
It might be reasonable to assume that the high correlations are due to the essay
requiring a similar argument to that used in the text itself. Although a breadth-first
organisation might be more compatible with a compare-and-contrast essay, it is not
a mandatory way of organising such essays. Essay 2 was, therefore, examined,
answering a different question: ‘Describe the difficulties of Rosch’s earlier models
of categorisation. Do the later models overcome these problems?’ Although the
essay brief is asking a different question, the text-essay correlations for the four
essays examined were also exactly 0.8. These essays mentioned concepts from the
second half of the page range (dealing with the typical features view), but there
were nevertheless references to concepts mentioned in the defining features section,
not all of which were strictly relevant (see Figure 6 for an example).
Discussion
Imitative problem solving predicts that the students learning a new domain would
keep close to the structure of the source text when engaged in reading for writing.
The correlations between the order of concepts in the source text and the order in
the essay were very high, ranging from 0.6 to 0.98. There is also an admittedly
weak indication that this remains the case, irrespective of the essay question. Imita-
tive problem solving assumes that the solver uses the structure of a source without
necessarily fully understanding it. Any adaptation of the source is likely to be mini-
mal due to the principle of conservative induction (Medin and Ross 1989). Just as
it is difficult to know what variance is ‘allowed’ when one encounters a new object
category, it is hard for novices to know how categories of problems (including the
problem of writing an essay) can vary in a new domain. As a result and irrespective
of the essay question, many student essays will reflect the content and structure of
the source, rather than the content and structure dictated by the essay question. It
has been argued that the structure of an essay depends on the student’s conception
of the essay writing process (Hounsell 2005); one would, therefore, expect that two
different essay questions should result in two different structural organisations.
It was also predicted that there would be a negative correlation between the
essay-text correlations and the essay grades. As mentioned earlier, there are many
variables involved in essay writing and marking, not the least of which is variability
Figure 6. Example of second set of ‘conceptual categories’ essays answering a different
question from Figures 1–3.
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 271

10. between markers (Johnson, Penny, and Gordon 2001). For the first set of essays on
the conceptual categories topic, there was a very low correlation. The markers were
unfamiliar with the textbook the students had to use (but familiar with the general
topic). Huot and Neal (2008, 427) point out that ‘without context, readers cannot
agree about the relative merit about specific pieces of writing and, more impor-
tantly, the decisions to be made on behalf of that writing’. For the essays on prob-
lem solving, on the other hand, the markers had access to the original text, and
there was a negative correlation between the grades awarded and the essay-text cor-
relations. In two cases, the markers noted independently that the essay was essen-
tially plagiarised and in others that the essay did not fully answer the question.
Nevertheless, apart from one ‘A’ student, most correlations for all essay topics were
around .8 for essays awarded a B or a C.
In other words, imitative problem solving is not confined to ‘weak’ students, but
is a strategy used in conditions of unfamiliarity by most students. That said, there is
not a great range of marks in the group shown in Table 3 – there are no ‘A’ grades
in this particular group. The grades for the problem solving essays do not follow
the same pattern, as the highest correlation gained the lowest mark and the lowest
correlation gained an A. It could be that a greater breadth of grades reflects a
greater variety of strategies in using the source text.
A high essay-text correlation suggests that the student is using a weak problem
solving method (imitative problem solving), suggestive of Marton and Säljö’s (1976)
discussion of surface processing of the source text. Understanding in a new domain is
often measured by the degree of transfer found (see e.g. Mayer 2001). Transferring
what one has learned or what one reads from one situation (the source text) to another
(the essay) requires adapting that learning to the new situation to meet the require-
ments of the essay question. Adaptation, in turn, requires going beyond surface simi-
larities and differences between the source problem or situation and the current
(target) one. The degree to which this happens is a measure of understanding. How-
ever, this did not appear to happen in the present case except in relatively few cases.
If students were using a surface processing strategy, why was the expected
negative correlation not found in the essays on conceptual categories? There are
two possible reasons. One possibility is that the markers in the first set of questions
on conceptual categories were being influenced strongly by the quality of the
writing at a ‘local’ level. Prosser and Webb’s (1994) analysis of sentences into
‘theme-new’ structures, where a sentence introduces a theme and then adds new
detail or expands on the theme, may well account for the apparently high scores for
high essay-text correlation essays. However, Prosser and Webb’s study does not
necessarily reveal the degree to which an essay’s structure relies on the structure of
the source text. It may be the case that we can often predict the structure of a stu-
dent’s essay from the structure of the source text, but we can predict the quality of
the essay only from the structure of the macro- and hyper-themes. Thus, an essay
that follows the structure of the textbook can still get a good mark, if it conforms
to the theme-new-based sentence structure suggested by Prosser and Webb, and
which may well appear in the source text the students are using.
A second possibility is that the students understood the content and seemed to
demonstrate this to the satisfaction of the markers in the way they presented the
content. They may not have seen a need, or even a way, to adapt the source text
structure to any great extent. The result was a knowledge-telling strategy (bearing
in mind that a pure knowledge-telling strategy can produce meaningful and coherent
272 S.I. Robertson

11. prose: Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987), which may be a demand characteristic of
relying on a single source. The essay advice given to students suggested that they
look at certain sections of the Eysenck and Keane (2000) textbook. Since this is
mentioned at the end of the advice, most students only refer to this textbook near
the end of the essay, if at all, and in most essays there was little evidence of an
attempt at integrating the two texts with students using only the main textbook:
hence, the student is not exposed to an alternative argument structure. There is evi-
dence for the same effect in Wiley and Voss (1999). They had students read texts
on a historical subject, either from a single text or from multiple (web-based)
sources. In the text-only condition, they found more sentences ‘borrowed’ from the
text. This was especially true, if the students were presenting a narrative or explana-
tion as opposed to an argument.
Students writing essays in an unfamiliar domain are likely to be very careful in
how they adapt source texts. Since the author of the source text has found a presum-
ably successful solution to the problem of presenting new information to readers, it
makes sense for the readers to keep close to what the source text says when writing;
otherwise, they may stray too far from relevancy or get the wrong end of the stick. It
also appears that in the degree of imitation of the source text in structuring an essay
is independent of the eventual assessed quality of the text when the context of the
marking is removed, which would be the case if the marker was unaware of the
sources a student writer had accessed. The danger of using this writing strategy is
that the writers may slip, however inadvertently, into plagiarism.
Notes on contributor
Sydney Ian Robertson completed a PhD at the Open University, UK on textbook problem
solving. He has published articles on students’ use of examples in textbooks, student
evaluation of teaching, and two books on thinking and problem solving. He is currently the
head of Psychology at the University of Bedfordshire.
References
Beauvais, C., T. Olive, and J.-M. Passerault. 2011. “Why Are Some Texts Good and Others
Not? Relationship between Text Quality and Management of the Writing Processes.”
Journal of Educational Psychology 103 (2): 415–428. doi:10.1037/a0022545.
Bereiter, C., and M. Scardamalia. 1987. The Psychology of Written Composition. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Butcher, K. R., and W. Kintsch. 2001. “Support of Content and Rhetorical Processes of
Writing: Effects on the Writing Process and the Written Product.” Cognition and Instruc-
tion 19 (3): 277–322.
Diederich, P. B., J. W. French, and S. T. Carlton. 1961. Factors in Judgment of Writing
Quality (Research Bulletin No. 61-15). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Entwistle, N. 1995. “Frameworks for Understanding as Experienced in Essay Writing and in
Preparing for Examination.” Educational Psychologist 30 (1): 47–55.
Eysenck, M., and M. T. Keane. 2000. Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook. 4th ed.
Hove: Erlbaum.
Flower, L. S., and J. R. Hayes. 1980. “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Historical
Problem.” College Composition and Communication 31: 21–32.
Flower, L. S., and J. R. Hayes. 1981. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College
Composition and Communication 32: 365–387.
Gentner, D. 1983. “Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy.” Cognitive
Science 7: 155–170.
Gick, M. L., and K. J. Holyoak. 1980. “Analogical Problem Solving.” Cognitive Psychology
12: 306–356.
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 273

12. Gick, M. L., and K. J. Holyoak. 1983. “Schema Induction and Analogical Transfer.”
Cognitive Psychology 15: 1–38.
Hartley, J., M. Trueman, L. Betts, and L. Brodie. 2006. “What Price Presentation? The
Effects of Typographic Variables on Essay Grades.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher
Education 31 (5): 523–534.
Hayes, J. R. 1989. “Writing Research: The Analysis of a Very Complex Task.” In Complex
Information Processing: The Impact of Herbert A. Simon, edited by D. Klahr and
K. Kotovsky, 209–268. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hayes, J. R., and L. S. Flower. 1980. “Identifying the Organisation of Writing Processes.” In
Cognitive Processes in Writing, edited by L. W. Gregg and E. R. Stienberg, 3–30. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hayes, J. R., and L. S. Flower. 1986. “Writing Research and the Writer.” American Psychol-
ogist 41 (10): 1106–1113.
Holyoak, K. J., and P. Thagard. 1995. Mental Leaps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hounsell, D. 2005. “Contrasting Conceptions of Essay-Writing.” In The Experience of Learn-
ing: Implications for Teaching and Studying in Higher Education, edited by F. Marton,
D. Hounsell and N. Entwistle, 3rd ed 106–125. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh,
Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment.
Huot, B., and M. Neal. 2008. “Writing Assessment: A Techno-History.” In Handbook of
Writing Research, edited by C. A. MacArthur, S, Graham and J. Fitzgerald, 417–432.
New York: Guilford Press.
Johnson, R. L., J. Penny, and B. Gordon. 2001. “Score Resolution and Interrater Reliability
of Holistic Scores in Rating Essays.” Written Communication 18 (2): 229–249.
Kahney, H. 1993. “Problem Solving: Current Issues.” In Open Guides to Psychology, edited
by J. Greene. 2nd ed. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Lavelle, E., and N. Zuercher. 2001. “The Writing Approaches of University Students.”
Higher Education 42: 373–391.
Marton, F., and R. Säljö. 1976. “On Qualitative Differences in Learning: I. Outcome and
Process.” British Journal of Educational Psychology 46: 4–11.
Mayer, R. E. 2001. Multimedia Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCutchen, D., A. Covill, S. H. Hoyne, and K. Mildes. 1994. “Individual Differences in Writing:
Implications of Translating Fluency.” Journal of Educational Psychology 86 (2): 256–266.
Medin, D. L., and B. H. Ross. 1989. “The Specific Character of Abstract Thought: Categori-
zation, Problem Solving and Induction.” In Advances in the Psychology of Human Intel-
ligence, edited by R. J. Sternberg, vol. 5, 189–223. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nash, J. G., G. M. Schumacher, and B. W. Carlson. 1993. “Writing from Sources: A Struc-
ture-Mapping Model.” Journal of Educational Psychology 85 (1): 159–170.
North, S. 2005. “Different Values, Different Skills? A Comparison of Essay Writing by Stu-
dents from Arts and Science Backgrounds.” Studies in Higher Education 30 (5): 517–533.
Prosser, M., and C. Webb. 1994. “Relating the Process of Undergraduate Essay Writing to
the Finished Product.” Studies in Higher Education 19 (2): 125–139.
Read, B., B. Francis, and Jocelyn Robson. 2001. “Playing Safe’: Undergraduate Essay Writ-
ing and the Presentation of the Student ‘Voice.” British Journal of Sociology of Educa-
tion 22 (3): 387–399.
Read, B., B. Francis, and Jocelyn Robson. 2005. “Gender, ‘Bias’, Assessment and Feedback:
Analyzing the Written Assessment of Undergraduate History Essays.” Assessment &
Evaluation in Higher Education 30 (3): 241–260.
Robertson, S. I. 2000. “Imitative Problem Solving: Why Transfer of Learning Often Fails to
Occur.” Instructional Science 28 (4): 263–289.
Robertson, S. I., and H. Kahney. 1996. “The Use of Examples in Expository Texts: Outline
of an Interpretation Theory for Text Analysis.” Instructional Science 24 (2): 89–119.
Roth, I., and V. Bruce. 1995. Perception and Representation: Current Issues. 2nd ed.
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Torrance, M., G. V. Thomas, and E. J. Robinson. 2000. “Individual Differences in Undergrad-
uate Essay-Writing Strategies: A Longitudinal Study.” Higher Education 39 (2): 181–200.
Wiley, J., and J. F. Voss. 1999. “Constructing Arguments from Multiple Sources: Tasks that
Promote Understanding and Not Just Memory for Text.” Journal of Educational
Psychology 91 (2): 301–311.
274 S.I. Robertson

13. Copyright of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education is the property of Routledge and
its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.

14. Copyright of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education is the property of Routledge and
its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.