While the merits of dialogic talk for supporting students' learning is well documented, the contribution of specific talk moves on learning outcomes remains less understood. This study was conducted to investigate how student-generated talk moves during whole-classroom discussions, as captured by the Low-Inference Discourse Observation tool,…

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which register knowledge, register-specific motivation, and diverse linguistic features are predictive of human judgment of writing quality in three registers--narrative, informative, and opinion. The secondary purpose is to compare the evaluation metrics of register-partitioned…

This study explores the performance of two emergent bilingual (EB) learners--a fifth-grade girl from refugee parents and a seventh-grade boy with university professor parents--on Constructed Response Questions (CRQs) in the STAAR test. Using qualitative methods such as interviews and writing sample analysis, the research evaluates their responses…

Recent advances in automated writing evaluation have enabled educators to use automated writing quality scores to improve assessment feasibility. However, there has been limited investigation of bias for automated writing quality scores with students from diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds. The use of biased scores could contribute to…

Recent advances in automated writing evaluation have enabled educators to use automated writing quality scores to improve assessment feasibility. However, there has been limited investigation of bias for automated writing quality scores with students from diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds. The use of biased scores could contribute to…

This qualitative study investigated the influence of Metawriting, or "writing about writing," on fifth-grade students' knowledge of writing and proficiency in composing informative essays. Using a Think-TalkWrite model, students explored their existing writing knowledge and experiences, analyzed their essays using genre-specific tools,…

Converging evidence indicates that argumentative thinking and writing are promoted by peer discourse. Here it is proposed that collaborative writing can serve as a bridge from peer discourse to individual argumentative writing. Three groups of sixth graders participated in a study that tested this hypothesis. Two of the groups took part in a…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether justifying one's own social knowledge (moral, societal, psychological) toward complex social-moral issues through collaborative argumentation was associated with the improvement of social perspective taking for elementary students. A total of 129 5th graders (52% female, Mage = 10.98) from six…

The current study replicated an earlier investigation by Bouwer and van der Veen (2023) where 10 Grade 5 and 6 classrooms in the Netherlands (210 students) were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition, with treatment students evidencing improvements in the quality of their essays after practice writing argumentative essays, reading…

The current study examined the development of early adolescents' social perspective taking (SPT) through collaborative small-group discussions. A total of 250 fifth-graders were assigned to three conditions, Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR) discussions, Read-Aloud (RA) and Regular Instruction (RI). SPT was assessed before and after the…

We used the POW + TREE strategy within the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) framework to teach six 6th graders with learning disabilities to write argumentative essays. A special education teacher implemented the intervention with high fidelity 5 days a week for 40 min each day. Students were grouped within three groups based on their…

We used multivariate generalizability theory to examine the reliability of hand-scoring and automated essay scoring (AES) and to identify how these scoring methods could be used in conjunction to optimize writing assessment. Students (n = 113) included subsamples of struggling writers and non-struggling writers in Grades 3-5 drawn from a larger…

The current study examined the extent to which sixth grade students used their pre-existing topic beliefs to guide comprehension of semantic ideas within multiple conflicting texts, and the sources providing them. Adolescents completed an inventory assessing their pre-reading topic beliefs one week prior to the study. During the study, students…

A current topic in U.S. public schools is teaching issues of racial discrimination in American history. There are those motivated by political gain for elected office that are trying to shut down conversations about slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws in K-12 schools while others point out the central role that race has played in U.S. history…

This study was conducted to determine the writing skills of bilingual students whose mother tongue is Kurdish and monoligual students whose mother tongue is Turkish in the fifth grade of secondary school. More specifically, the story and essay writing skills of bilingual students are compared with the writing skills of monolingual students based…