This study was situated at Mountain Middle School (Pseudonym). Students at Mountain Middle School often engage in collaborative compositions embedded within week-long multidisciplinary and multiage units of study called Odysseys. These units of study and the collaborative composition projects are classified as formal cooperative learning. Johnson…

The local problem explored in this study was the barriers and challenges facing middle school teachers in integrating and assessing writing in a science classroom. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore the perspectives of college instructors and middle school science teachers regarding how teacher education programs provide…

Results from national and state writing assessments suggest teachers struggle to meet the writing needs of students with disabilities as they score significantly lower than the overall population. With the implementation of Common Core State Standards in 2010, text-based writing became increasingly important for academic success both in the…

A qualitative case study explored teachers' perceptions and beliefs about a mandated literacy instruction program at a mid-western rural middle school. This study used the implementation of a mandated reading and writing program as a basis for learning how programs can be sustainable and provide teachers with self-efficacy. This study used…

Many students across the US, specifically in Texas, struggle with writing on grade level. On the last National Assessment of Educational Progress (2012), 70% of eighth- and twelfth-grade students were not writing on grade level. On the 2021 State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) Writing, only 26% of the fourth grade students met…

The push to teach coding in schools continues to gain momentum. Coding helps students develop skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as improve overall academic performance. However, students with disabilities often face challenges in areas such as problem-solving, mathematics, and multistep reasoning when learning…

The genre of persuasive writing requires writers to independently probe their long-term memory to generate pertinent ideas that support their opinion on a given topic. However, many students with high-incidence disabilities struggle with the complex synergy of tasks involved in writing, and in particular generating ideas. A qualitatively dominant…

While the Common Core State Standards initiated the instructional shift that promoted technology to achieve a student-centered, process-oriented blended reading and writing classroom, the COVID-19 pandemic demanded innovative technology applications in K-12 public schools. This qualitative, phenomenological action research study explored the…

This was a qualitative case study that focused on the discrepancy of literacy development at the middle school level of average students. The longitudinal case study expanded the course of one and a half academic years; beginning in August 2019 and concluding in January 2021. The study focused on two male participants who exhibited incongruent…

This dissertation comprises a set of three connected articles framed by a narrative inquiry methodology, which explores the literacy practices of a teacher and her students in an English Language Arts middle school classroom at a midwestern urban public school. Part one investigates teacher practices and discourses that led to creating an…

Writing is a difficult task for most students. Only 27% of all students in America can write proficiently at or above grade level (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2012). With the recent adoption of rigorous standards (i.e., Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards), secondary students are…

This study was a narrative inquiry that investigated middle school students' experiences with an informal writing group. The six primary participants were members of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMO). During the month of November, each of the primary participants set a word count goal and composed a novel. Participants met together at group…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to understand how an English Language Arts (ELA) teacher of 7th and 8th grade students with language-based learning disabilities attempted to learn about and integrate into her instructional practice the teaching of argumentative writing using multimodal technologies. The ELA teacher's attempt at…

In an "ex post facto" causal-comparative research design, this study investigated the effectiveness of a formative writing assessment program, Write Score, on increasing student writing achievement. Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) reading language arts and writing scores from 2012 were utilized for this study. The…