Background: Many empirical investigations focus on how personality traits and academic motivation are related to academic achievement. Regarding the personality traits described in the five-factor model, prior research has shown associations between openness to experience and language achievement in particular. Following the principle of trait…

This piece focuses on increasing writing instruction for secondary English teacher candidates in the form of integrating reading and writing. Often, teacher candidates are not sufficiently prepared in university coursework to teach writing and are left to rely on formulaic writing that merely prepares their students for the end-of-year tests.…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to obtain insights into how creativity is (a) demonstrated in coursework and assignments, (b) addressed and fostered in the classroom, (c) affected by standardized testing, and (d) impacted by culture. These purposes were achieved by gathering qualitative data from a sample of 8 teachers and 8…

In this districtwide scale-up, we randomly assigned seventh-grade students within 11 schools to receive a series of writing exercises designed to promote values affirmation. Impacts on cumulative seventh-grade grade point average (GPA) for the district's racial/ethnic minority students who may be subject to stereotype threat are consistent with…

Many of today's adolescents are constantly engaging with information through texting, watching videos, listening to music, and even writing papers. Learning to interact properly with information through writing presents a challenge for the students because they are employing all of these applications at once and believe that they are multitasking…

Students hold many misconceptions as they transition from arithmetic to algebraic thinking, and these misconceptions can hinder their performance and learning in the subject. To identify the errors in Algebra I which are most persistent and pernicious in terms of predicting student difficulty on standardized test items, the present study assessed…

Writing assessments have taken two primary forms in the past two decades: direct and indirect. Irrespective of type, either form needs to be anchored to making decisions in the classroom and predicting performance on high-stakes tests, particularly in a high-stakes environment with serious consequences. In this study, 11th-grade students were…

To teach science writing effectively, scholars encourage combining writing to learn with applications of the science writing heuristic. How teachers learn to do so remains under-examined. This essay follows a cohort of ninth-grade science teachers who collaborated in a project to develop, test, and revise such a combination of writing prompts for…

In this study, 72 secondary English teachers from the Santa Ana Unified School District were randomly assigned to participate in the Pathway Project, a cognitive strategies approach to teaching interpretive reading and analytical writing, or to a control condition involving typical district training focusing on teaching content from the textbook.…

This study investigates the effects of integrating literacy instruction with biology coursework on high school student learning. It would investigate the relationship between the growth in reading achievement and biology learning. It will target schools serving especially large populations of African American and Latino students. The project will…