In this study, I present a qualitative analysis of 11 writing portfolios drawn from a yearlong instructional program designed to apprentice students into the practices of argumentative writing typical of early-college coursework in the United States. The students' formal and informal writings were parsed into utterances and coded along two…

Background: Marking of essays is mainly carried out by human raters who bring in their own subjective and idiosyncratic evaluation criteria, which sometimes lead to discrepancy. This discrepancy may in turn raise issues like reliability and fairness. The current research attempts to explore the evaluation criteria of markers on a national level…

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today's globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the "cosmopolitan turn" in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student…

This classroom-based qualitative study sought to investigate students' writing in response to culturally relevant literature. Eleven students enrolled in two grade twelve, special education classrooms in a large, urban high school participated in the study. The students included Dive female, six male, three Hispanic and eight African American; all…

This study examined the nature and frequency of error in high school native English speaker (L1) and English learner (L2) writing. Four main research questions were addressed: Are there significant differences in students' error rates in English language arts (ELA) and social studies? Do the most common errors made by students differ in ELA…

Although the Common Core and C3 Framework highlight literacy and inquiry as central goals for social studies, they do not offer guidelines, assessments, or curriculum resources. This practical guide presents six research-tested historical investigations along with all corresponding teaching materials and tools that have improved the historical…

Proficiency in writing increases opportunities in higher education, employment, and social relationships. Many students in the United States, however, are struggling writers. In particular, the writing performance of students with disabilities in secondary grades continues to lag behind grade level peers. The purpose of this article was to review…

This paper compares two attempts by the author to teach two different grade 12 world history classes to think historically. Both classes were presented with a similar assignment that revolved around the conflicting historical accounts of Christopher Columbus. However, the second group of students was also provided with direct instruction about the…

This study investigates the consistency between human raters and an automated essay scoring system in grading high school students' English compositions. A total of 923 essays from 23 classes of 12 senior high schools in Taiwan (Republic of China) were obtained and scored manually and electronically. The results show that the consistency between…

Explicitly and systematically teaching strategies for planning and drafting specific types of text has improved the writing of elementary and middle school students with disabilities in previous studies. In this investigation, we examined the effect of teaching a planning and drafting strategy for persuasive writing to high school students with…

This article describes a project conducted with Year 12 English students. It was based on the model of "Teaching as Inquiry" (Ministry of Education, 2007) and aimed to develop students' self-efficacy in relation to their literature-response essay writing. Self-efficacy was measured using Bandura's (2006) self-efficacy scale and an…

This article examines the "master" and "little" cultural narratives students perform in literacy narratives. Results show that students incorporate the literacy-equals-success master narrative most often, yet they also include in little narratives figures such as the hero, victim, and child prodigy. I consider how these findings can improve…

A group of 64 Israeli twelfth-grade students of two different ethnic backgrounds participated in an experiment exploring the effects of argumentative design and social identity on the learning of a charged, ethnicity-related historical controversy. Students were divided into two learning conditions: an argumentative-disciplinary condition and a…

This article describes a writing workshop that took place with 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students who received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. As a result, students improved the quality of their college admission essays and demonstrated greater confidence with this writing task. This…

This essay is a descriptive review of the child. It was written in preparation for a collaborative, inquiry-based protocol that was developed at the Prospect School in North Bennington, VT. Focusing on Aisha, a twelfth-grade student, this descriptive review discusses the following: physical presence and gesture, disposition and temperament,…