Seventy-five general and 65 special education teachers working in the same 65 elementary schools in 12 different U.S. school districts were surveyed about their mindsets concerning the malleability of writing and intelligence as well as their practices for teaching writing. All teachers taught writing to one or more fourth-grade students receiving…

Learning to write is one of the great challenges children face in primary grades, requiring both transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) and executive functions (EFs; working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility). Although this claim is widely accepted, the field suffers from some limitations, including few longitudinal…

Within the current test-centered educational reform movement, considerable emphasis is placed on using assessment results to make instructional decisions for individual students. Test scores are used to estimate a student's current level of skill, monitor his or her progress during instruction, and identify whether the student has gained the…

We studied children's conceptions of the writing process while the complex cognitive activity of writing is carried out through a pictorial representation of the writing process. Sixty children attending Kindergarten, first grade and fourth grade in Bariloche, Argentina, were presented individually with a sequence of four questions about the…