The ability to write well is inextricably linked to reading comprehension, acquisition of content knowledge, and college and career readiness. Many adolescent students, especially those from economically challenged (EC) households, struggle in their ability to communicate in writing, especially in writing to explain or inform across subject areas.…

This study examined the effectiveness of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) to improve students' ability to write expository essays after reading social studies text. Third-grade general education teachers (N = 14) were randomly assigned by clusters to SRSD or a business as usual control condition. One hundred and eighty consented students…

Organizational patterns can serve as a teaching strategy for instructors and as a learning tool for students to develop their expository writing skills, which are commonly required for assignments (for example, laboratory reports and research papers) in Food Science courses and in their future careers. The article discusses the importance of…

The effects of preteaching key words on fluency in connected text were examined with three third-grade general education participants. Researchers used a multiple base-line design (i.e., Baseline and Wordlist Intervention) and found that preteaching increased fluency in connected text written above the participant's instructional level of reading…

TeenACE for Science (TAS) is a writing intervention that combines components of Multimedia Technology, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) to help students develop expository writing skills in science. This developmental study examined the effect of the TAS intervention with two groups of culturally…

In this study, we analyzed the quality of students' written scientific explanations found in notebooks and explored the link between the quality of the explanations and students' learning. We propose an approach to systematically analyzing and scoring the quality of students' explanations based on three components: claim, evidence to support it,…

Argues that freshman composition courses should teach students to use writing to develop an awareness and trust in their own thinking processes. Cautions that students who get nothing but directive instruction will be handicapped in learning to think for themselves. (RS)

Designed to help teachers find an effective approach in teaching expository writing, this guide divides expository writing into five main types: definition/classification, comparison/contrast, thesis/proof, problem/solution, and inference (drawing conclusions). Five different starter techniques are presented with each of the five main types of…

Attempting to place in an American context many of the ideas about the teaching of writing that were first developed in England, this book contains contributions from internationally prominent teachers/scholars who attended the New York University-CBS Sunrise Semester course on learning to write and writing to learn. The text also reflects the…

Intended for high school composition instructors, this book resolves the seeming contradiction between creative, expressive writing and formal exposition and argumentation by presenting a teaching method that treats creative writing as a necessary--if not sufficient--cause for exposition. The first two chapters describe a sequence of short fiction…

The twelve essays in this collection, selected by leading teacher educators, explore the composition process and composition instruction. The first essay, "Toward Righting Writing" by Arthur Diagon, serves as a prologue while the second section, "getting started," consists of "A Way of Writing" by William Stafford,…

This article focuses on the process of promoting academic achievement for second-language learners by imaginatively connecting expository comprehension. The goals of this article are: (1) to increase understanding of instructional strategies among teachers at all levels that impact on reading comprehension in the content areas for second language…

Scientific and technical jargon--specialized vocabulary, usually Latinate--plays a vital role in scientific and technical communication. But its proper use continues to be a point of discussion because of our concern with audience adaptation, rhetorical exigence, rhetorical purpose, and ethics. We've focused on teaching students--and on convincing…

The case approach to academic writing requires a student to use subjects in an active way while writing. This approach, appropriate in content courses as well as in composition classes, improves a writer's logic more quickly and effectively than concentrating on logic alone. In the case approach, a student is given a body of information about a…

Given that very little is known about the kinds of writing experiences students have in content areas beyond writing for evaluative purpose, a study investigated how writing tasks interact with learning and also how the instructional context in which writing is embedded influences what students contribute to and take from writing. The effects of…