The quality of students' writing skills continues to concern educators. Because writing is essential to success in both college and career, poor writing can have lifelong consequences. Writing is now primarily done digitally, but students receive limited explicit instruction in digital writing. This lack of instruction means that students fail to…

The National Writing Project (NWP) has contributed enormously and consistently to the effort to help teachers help students learn to write. In the early 1970s, researchers such as Donald Graves and Janet Emig began studying the ways writers go about the task of thinking and producing polished writing. The NWP's book "Because Writing…

By the upper elementary grades, writing becomes an essential tool both for learning and for showing what you know. Students who struggle significantly with writing are at a terrible disadvantage. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that only 25% of students can be classified as competent writers; students with…

The purpose of the 2011 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Writing Framework is to describe how the new NAEP Writing Assessment is designed to measure students' writing at grades 4, 8, and 12. As the ongoing national indicator of the academic achievement of students in the United States, NAEP regularly collects information on…

This edition of "NAEPfacts" discusses the frequency with which process-oriented activities are taught in United States schools, and the writing performance of students whose teachers emphasize these activities. Data were drawn from the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Writing, which was administered to a…

Based on a survey conducted in 1992 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a study examined the types of writing students performed in school, the quality of their classroom writing, and the relationship between their classroom writing and their performance on the NAEP writing assessment. A nationally representative subgroup of…