Scoring rubrics are known to be effective for assessing writing for both testing and classroom teaching purposes. How raters interpret the descriptors in a rubric can significantly impact the subsequent final score, and further, the descriptors may also color a rater's judgment of a student's writing quality. Little is known, however, about how…

The principal aim of strategy-focused instruction is to teach students strategies to control their writing processes and achieve quality writing. For this purpose, nine 4th grade Elementary School classes from three different schools (N = 215) were randomly allocated to two forms of strategy-focused program called cognitive self-regulation…

Although the Toulmin model (1958) has dominated argumentation research, it does not provide many tools for evaluating argument quality. Towards that end, we draw on work in philosophy on argument schemes, and critical questions for evaluating those schemes. In our approach, we integrate the teaching of critical questions with argumentation vee…

Writing allows access to venues often limited by poverty, disabilities, and geography. Promoting writing skills can create bridges to overcome the isolation that often keeps communities from engaging with one another. However, most of the students in the nation's schools are not capable writers and find the persuasive genres challenging. In this…

We designed and investigated the first set of instructional procedures we are aware of to teach 4th and 5th grade students how to write a persuasive essay following close reading of a source text. Eight boys and girls attending a diverse, low income school who were having difficulty learning to write participated in an experimental…

Effective academic writing is accessible to readers because writers follow shared conventions for organization and signal their stance on particular topics; however, few specifics are known about how middle graders might develop knowledge of and use these academic language forms and functions to signal their organization and stance in persuasive…