The purpose of the following case study was to examine the daybooks of 3 fourth-grade writers who autonomously determined the content they included across the pages of their composition books. Three themes emerged from an analysis of their daybooks: (1) Students used their daybooks to engage their "writing process"; (2) students used…

Adolescents today need mental health support (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2024), and schools are a place where a universal approach to positive well-being can be promoted (Weissberg, 2019). While programs exist for social and emotional learning (SEL), there is a call for teachers to find a way for daily SEL integration into the…

According to recent studies, over half of students in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades lack the ability to write proficiently on standardized writing assessments. Revealed in recent studies is that many students enter college and are unable to write at the college level, as well as enter the workforce lacking writing skills. The problem is that most…

Teachers of young writers often feel pressure to focus on narrow, tested conventions, forms and processes of writing. These pressures can contribute to instruction that does not consider students' interests, experiences, language or cultures, but rather can further deficit views of students whose backgrounds do not closely align with those making…

We examined the effects of a text-based argument writing intervention, "Triple Q," on argument writing skills in a cluster-randomized trial where groups of middle schools were assigned to conditions within school-level SES blocks. The intervention comprised three 15-day units. Students read and discussed argument texts representing…

As technology continues to shape how students read and write, digital literacy practices have become increasingly multimodal and complex--posing new challenges for researchers seeking to understand these processes in authentic educational settings. This paper presents three qualitative studies that use multimodal analyses and visual modeling to…

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is a method designed to explicitly teach students self-regulation skills and help them implement them. While SRSD's beneficial effect on writing quality has been confirmed in a large body of literature, the questions of why, how, and for whom SRSD works remain unclear. To investigate the underlying…

Research shows that writing motivation decreases throughout schooling and predicts writing performance. However, this evidence comes primarily from cross-sectional studies. Here, we adopted a longitudinal approach to (a) examine the development of attitudes toward writing, writing self-efficacy domains, and motives to write from Grade 6 to 7, and…

Writing involves a complex web of deliberations as writers make specific choices from their repertoire of grammatical resources. However, curriculum and assessment criteria that favour top-down prescriptions of writing marginalise the agency of the writer (Gardner, 2012). Conversely, we posit a bottom-up process that integrates grammar teaching…

The current study replicated an earlier investigation by Bouwer and van der Veen (2023) where 10 Grade 5 and 6 classrooms in the Netherlands (210 students) were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition, with treatment students evidencing improvements in the quality of their essays after practice writing argumentative essays, reading…

This article reports on findings from the first year of a professional learning partnership aimed at supporting elementary teachers in improving their writing instruction for emergent bilingual students. Specifically, we present a case study of one fourth grade teacher's writing instruction, exploring how an introduction to a functional approach…

Seventy-five general and 65 special education teachers working in the same 65 elementary schools in 12 different U.S. school districts were surveyed about their mindsets concerning the malleability of writing and intelligence as well as their practices for teaching writing. All teachers taught writing to one or more fourth-grade students receiving…

Writing motivation has been deemed a critical aspect of the writing process because motivation affects how students engage with the writing process, how much effort and time they exert in the tasks, and the quality of their written products (Graham, 2018). Writing motivation has been the focus of recent studies on how to improve the discouraging…

This study addresses a problem of practice at Nipmuc Elementary School (NES), a large urban elementary school in New England. State standardized test data and student writing samples showed that students were performing well-below grade level in writing. The primary factors driving this problem included teachers' lack of knowledge and low…

Spelling is an important skill that requires knowledge of phonology, morphology, and orthography, as well as strong visual memory. In this study, we introduce a spelling coding rubric that accounts for different knowledge types needed for spelling and can be used to describe error patterns for both encoding and decoding as part of the writing…