Integrated writing assessments are tasks that require students to construct an essay using evidence from source texts. Topic models are statistical models used to analyze text. This study analyzes two integrated writing tasks from students in grades 6 (N=1,250) and 8 (N=1,250) using topic models. Independent evaluations of the essays were also…

Writing is essential for all students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills across various subject areas and tasks. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) indicate that first graders should write opinion papers, explanatory texts, and narratives. Further, the CCSS requires students beginning in kindergarten to explore digital tools to produce…

This guide helps families and caregivers carry out recommended practices described in the What Works Clearinghouse educator's practice guide, "Teaching Elementary School Students to be Effective Writers" (ED533112). It provides three tips for supporting writing skills at home: (1) Help children use the writing process for a variety of…

This study compares a problem-solving account of discovery through writing, which attributes discovery to strategic rhetorical planning and assumes discovery is associated with better quality text, to a dual-process account, which attributes discovery to the combined effect of 2 conflicting processes with opposing relationships to text quality.…

The authors in this study used a pre-posttest experimental design with random assignment to treatment or control group to assess the use of an electronic editing cognitive strategy. The participants were 16 college students with intellectual and developmental disabilities enrolled in a 2-year postsecondary program at a Midwestern institute of…

The present study was undertaken to measure the metacognitive writing awareness of university-Flevel learners. The participants of the study are 101 students of English Language and Literature, enrolled at a state university in Turkey. The grade level of the students ranges from the first grade to the fourth grade. In order to collect data, a…

With the current expansion of digital tools, the media used for narration is changing, challenging traditional literacies in educational settings. The present study explores what kind of activities emerge when six-year-old children in a preschool class write a digital story, using a word processor and speech-synthesised feedback computer software.…

In an effort to identify effective instructional practices for teaching writing to elementary grade students, we conducted a meta-analysis of the writing intervention literature, focusing our efforts on true and quasi-experiments. We located 115 documents that included the statistics for computing an effect size (ES). We calculated an average…

This study compares second-year Japanese university students' strategies to write kanji by hand with their strategies to produce the kanji characters on a computer, taking into account factors such as accuracy in writing, the amount of kanji used, the complexity of the kanji used, as well as how the characters used compare with the sequence…

Two experiments examined whether text quality is related to online management of the writing processes. Experiment 1 focused on the relationship between online management and text quality in narrative and argumentative texts. Experiment 2 investigated how this relationship might be affected by a goal emphasizing text quality. In both experiments,…

Students at the University of Edinburgh do almost all their work on computers, but at the end of the semester they are examined by handwritten essays. Intuitively it would be appealing to allow students the choice of handwriting or typing, but this raises a concern that perhaps this might not be "fair"--that the choice a student makes,…

Many academics continue to approach the multi-path and multi-voiced capacity of the Internet's networked nodal structure as if it were a book with pages and paragraphs and sentences that flow together in one direction to make a whole. A different approach to that of traditional writing, is required to make effective use of the distinctive…

There is considerable concern that the majority of adolescents do not develop the competence in writing they need to be successful in school, the workplace, or their personal lives. A common explanation for why youngsters do not write well is that schools do not do a good job of teaching this complex skill. In an effort to identify effective…

This report offers a number of specific teaching techniques that research suggests will help 4th- to 12th-grade students in this nation's schools. The report focuses on all students, not just those who display writing difficulties, although this latter group is deservedly the focus of much attention. The premise of this report is that all students…