Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) often perform well below their peers across academic areas, with lower math and reading scores and higher school failure and grade retention rates (Reid, Gonzalez, Nordness, Trout, & Epstein, 2004). However, writing is the most significant academic deficit for these students (Austinner,…

A random national sampling of primary grade teachers in the United States were surveyed to determine how they teach revising to writers in the elementary grades. Our findings suggest that in our sample of teachers, little time is dedicated in the school day to writing and especially revising. The teachers believed that more time spent revising did…

Constructing well-formed sentences is an important element of writing. However, many students struggle with this skill; in particular, writers with learning disability (LD). In this study sentence-combining practice with a peer-assistance component was used to improve the ability of four young students with LD to construct sentences and compose…

In this study, supplemental writing instruction in planning and revising was used to improve the stories written by young writers with learning disabilities (LD) and poor writing skills. Six second-grade students practiced a strategy for planning and writing stories using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) approach and then revised…

Mastering sentence-construction skills is essential to learning to write. Limited sentence-construction skills may hinder a writer's ability to translate ideas into text. It may also inhibit or interfere with other composing processes, as developing writers must devote considerable cognitive effort to sentence construction. The authors examined…

The distinction between revising and editing is a hard one for middle schoolers to grasp. Bruce Saddler knows that students must understand that writing means making meaning, and making meaning requires revision. Internalizing that concept and the steps that help achieve it requires a process characterized by peer conferencing, revision guides…