A teacher of secondary learning disabled students describes how she began to work on her students' writing skills by incorporating a five-minute writing exercise into the beginning of each class. In addition to increased interest in writing, the approach also improved classroom management by the comfortable routine. (CL)

A highly structured six-step strategy to teach paragraph organization skills to learning disabled secondary students revealed that the students, who were beginning rather than remedial writers, could profit from a formula writing approach that focused on one writing component at a time with maximum practice. (CL)

A teacher of secondary learning disabled students describes an effective way of teaching grammar, mechanics, and usage by focusing on revising and editing of the students' own work. (CL)

The written language characteristics of 26 learning disabled (LD), 26 low achieving (LA), and 26 achieving (ACH) students in grades 7 through 10 were measured using paragraph writing and topic sentence tasks. Tests of differences between LD and LA Ss revealed that spelling was the only formal feature which was significantly higher in the LA group.…

Twenty-one learning-disabled eighth and eleventh graders wrote essays and answered a questionnaire concerning metacognition. Subjects were comparable to normally achieving sixth graders in their essays' interestingness, clarity in communication of goals, word choice, paragraph structure, and metacognition about the writing process. (Author/JDD)

Discusses a model of argumentation adapted for instructional intervention with general education students and students with learning disabilities (LD). Reports results from three studies in which an experimental intervention has achieved some success in addressing the difficulties that students with LD have with argumentative writing. Draws…

The study examined the use of expository text structure as a reading and writing strategy with 15 learning-disabled adolescents, 15 normally achieving adolescents, and 15 normally achieving fourth graders. Two reading tasks required students to recognize sequence or comparison-contrast text structure. The third task required students to write…

The use of systematic prompting and monitoring to increase written sentence production during a ten-minute assigned composition task was investigated with 78 learning disabled (LD) students in grades 7-12. Subjects were classified as LD, were receiving special education services, and evidenced at least a 2-year lag in written language skills. Six…

This article briefly reviews problem-solving deficits in learning-disabled adolescents; describes decision stories; and explores how they can be used to make students more active, problem-solving learners. Three decision stories are presented to demonstrate their potential for helping students approach and/or solve academic and social problems.…

Two studies are reported which investigated the efficacy of an interactive approach to teaching writing revision skills for 11 adolescents with learning disabilities. Results from both studies indicated that interactive teaching successfully taught students to identify ambiguities and make their writing more salient. (Author/PB)

Learning disabled writers are unable to incorporate text structures to plan their writing; they stop writing before their point is stated; their writing includes redundancies, irrelevancies, and many mechanical and spelling problems. Studies indicate that learning disabled writers use simplistic and/or ineffective planning strategies while…

Four eighth-grade students with learning disabilities were taught paragraph-writing skills using a metacognitive text structure strategy, which included an outline as a paragraph planning guide. Results suggest that when provided with such direct, intensive instruction, these students can improve their paragraph writing. (Author/MSE)

This article describes the Cognitive Strategy in Writing program (originally intended for elementary-age students), and adaptation and application of the social constructivist approach with seven junior high and high school students with learning disabilities. Pretest-posttest assessment indicated dramatic improvements in overall quality and…

Investigated the impact of integrated proofreading strategy training, which combined a computer-based spelling checker and student strategies, on the proofreading of three secondary students with learning disabilities. Students showed an increase in strategy use and percentage of spelling errors corrected on controlled proofreading materials and…