Three studies examined if teachers' beliefs about writing predicted their efficacy to teach writing. We surveyed primary grade teachers from Taiwan (N = 782), Shanghai (N = 429), and the United States (N = 214). At each location, teachers completed surveys assessing attitudes toward writing and the teaching of writing, beliefs about students'…

Despite the early emergence of oral argumentation, written argumentation is slow to develop, insensitive to alternative perspectives, and generally of poor quality. These findings are unsettling because high quality argumentative writing is expected throughout the curriculum and needed in an increasingly competitive workplace that requires…

High school students with high-incidence disabilities and struggling writers face considerable challenges when taking writing assessments designed for college entrance. This study examined the effectiveness of a writing intervention for improving students' performance on a college entrance exam, the writing assessment for the ACT. Students were…

Individual differences in motivational beliefs, such as writing efficacy and attitudes toward writing in different contexts (academic, recreational, print or digital), are hypothesised to account for variability in writing performance. This study tested this proposition with 185 middle school students (58% were male), examining if writing…

We designed and investigated the first set of instructional procedures we are aware of to teach 4th and 5th grade students how to write a persuasive essay following close reading of a source text. Eight boys and girls attending a diverse, low income school who were having difficulty learning to write participated in an experimental…

In this response to Burdick et al. (2013), the author describes two possible and perhaps even common reactions to the article by Burdick et al. (2013). Advocates such as Way, Davis, and Strain- Seymour (2008) will likely applaud the development of the Writing Ability Developmental Scale and the possible widespread use of computer-based writing…

This study examined the number of writing samples needed to obtain a reliable estimate of young struggling writers' capabilities. It further assessed if performance in one genre was reflective of performance in other genres for these children. Second- and third-grade students (81 boys, 56 girls), who were identified as struggling writers in need…

During this decade there have been numerous efforts to identify instructional practices that improve students' writing. These include "Reading Next" (Biancarosa and Snow, 2004), which provided a set of instructional recommendations for improving writing, and "Writing Next" (Graham and Perin, 2007) and "Writing to Read" (Graham and Hebert, 2010),…

One ingredient that may serve as a catalyst for writing development is changes in writing knowledge. This study assessed the veracity of two tenets underlying this proposal: that skilled writers are more knowledgeable than less skilled writers, and that individual differences in knowledge are related to writing performance. Both of these…

The review of the Test of Written Language-2 (TOWL-2) raises concerns about alternate forms reliability, subtest reliability, content validity, and omissions. It concludes that the TOWL-2 is an expanded and greatly modified version of the original test but may not be appropriate for identifying a student's specific writing problems. (DB)

Investigation of examiners' (N=44) evaluations of writing performance of learning-disabled (LD) students indicated that the LD label influenced ratings assigned by examiners (undergraduate education students) who were simply familiarized with the scoring procedure. Evaluations by examiners who received additional practice and training were not…

Using self-instructional strategy training procedures, three sixth-grade learning disabled students were taught a series of self-directed prompts designed to facilitate the generation, framing, and planning of written compositions. The eight-step instructional procedure included pretraining, review of baseline performance level, description of the…

The influence of disability labels, writing behavior of the person labeled, evaluator's expertise, and the interaction between these variables on the scores assigned to children's writing was examined. Disability labels did not affect the score, but the quality of writing and the examiner's expertise had a significant influence. (JAZ)

This investigation sought to determine the extent to which examiners' evaluations of writing performance were influenced by the learning disability label and to identify mediating variables which modify expectancy effects. Forty-four preservice regular education teachers were randomly assigned to one of two expectancy conditions (learning-disabled…