Background: Written composition requires handwriting, spelling, and text planning skills, all largely learned through school instruction. Students' rate of learning to compose text in their first months at school will depend, in part, on their literacy-related abilities at school start. These effects have not previously been explored. Aim: We…

Purpose: The primary aims of this study were to: (1) to describe average change in the writing quality of fifth grade students from the fall and spring of the school year; (2) examine relations between linguistic features and writing quality rating; and (3) test for differential growth between groups of students who differ in linguistic and…

Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how community college students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students' genre knowledge to their academic performance. The present article discusses how 104…

Many connectives, such as "therefore" and "however," are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level…

Research Findings: Home literacy practices are an important variable in the development of literacy skills among children. However, several questions regarding the relationship between home literacy practices and writing are unanswered. The objective of this correlational study is to examine the relationship between reading-related and…

This study examined the perceived effects of test preparation for College English Test Band 4 (CET4) on development of language ability and test performance, which has not received sufficient attention previously. A total of 79 undergraduate students from two classes in a Chinese university participated in the study. At the end of the CET4…

Research Findings: Home literacy practices are an important variable in the development of literacy skills among children. However, several questions regarding the relationship between home literacy practices and writing are unanswered. The objective of this correlational study is to examine the relationship between reading-related and…

Mid-adolescence is a period of considerable potential growth in the language for academic writing. Yet, to date, few writing studies explore language development during this period and even fewer focus on longitudinal or diverse samples. In this study, we examined the development of language skills for academic writing in a socio-economically…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…