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…

Middle school social studies teachers are increasingly working on argument writing in their classrooms so that students can successfully write counterarguments that acknowledge competing perspectives about historical and social issues by the end of eighth grade. The authors' prior research indicates that eighth-grade students "can" grow…

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and…

Informational text writing is a complex task requiring multiple literacy skills, such as reading and comprehending source material, identifying important information, and transforming ideas to meet the goals for the new writing task. The "Structures Writing" intervention was developed to improve the informational text writing skills of…

The purpose of this research was to identify the common errors made in English writing by Malaysian Chinese primary year 6 ESL students and to determine the extent of the influence of the first language, Mandarin in ESL writing. The Mandarin language uses a logographic writing system while the English language is written in alphabetic scripts. The…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…