During the first week of the 1999 Fall semester, before any instruction was done, the Aluminum passage was given to students in four sections of my college Freshman Composition course. No oral instructions were given, other than to follow the directions on the sheet. The sheet was handed out with approximately twenty minutes remaining in the class period. Students were allowed to stay ten minutes late to finish, if they wished. Unfortunately (because some of the revisions are incomplete), no specific records were kept on which students stayed late.
     Ninety-three revisions were collected. Because I do not have assistants or financial support for this research, I had to transcribe the papers myself. This, of course, raises questions of validity, but the original papers are available for anyone who wishes to pay for having copies made for them.
     Although all the students were asked to sign release forms, such forms may not be necessary with fairly large groups of students. It is very doubtful if any student could recognize his or her revision of the passage, and personal identification has been eliminated from all versions presented on the web. 
     At some time in the future, it may be of interest to seek permission to correlate the students' work with their general success in college, for example, by matching the results of the 93 students' revisions with their final G.P.A. in college. More specifically, averages for different constructions could be determined for all the students who graduated with a G.P.A. better than 3.0, etc. For those of us interested in grammar instruction, it would certainly be interesting to see, if there is a correlation between syntactic maturity and success in college.
     Once the passages were transcribed, the data was counted, coded, and crunched.