This study was situated at Mountain Middle School (Pseudonym). Students at Mountain Middle School often engage in collaborative compositions embedded within week-long multidisciplinary and multiage units of study called Odysseys. These units of study and the collaborative composition projects are classified as formal cooperative learning. Johnson…

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…

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…

The current two studies examined the effects of an instructional unit on synthesis writing for 9th grade students on holistic text quality. Because students' writing routines have been shown to affect the effectiveness of writing instruction, we designed a unit that aimed to be equally effective for all writers, regardless of their routines. On…

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…

Background: Writing is integral to educational success at all levels and to success in the workplace. However, low literacy is a global challenge, and many students lack sufficient skills to be good writers. With the rapid advance of technology, computer-based tools that provide automated feedback are being increasingly developed. However, mixed…

This study aimed to examine the mediating role of metacognitive writing strategies in the relationship between middle school students' self-regulation skills in the writing process and their writing anxiety. Using structural equation modelling, the data collected from 513 middle school students were analysed with advanced statistical techniques…

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…

Ask teachers about their biggest challenges in elementary and middle school, and many will cite the teaching of writing. It is often difficult for students find the joy, discovery, and satisfaction writing can yield. Published programs abound, focusing on the study of genres, and students learn to emulate professional writers. What Lisa Eickholdt…

This study investigates how PBL enhances students' critical thinking abilities as they compose narrative texts based on indigenous narratives in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. The research conducted among 35 ninth-grade students (divided into seven groups) in a public junior high school in Bandung, Indonesia, using qualitative…

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…

Background or Context: The notion of writer's block has been primarily conceived and explored as a breakdown in a cognitive writing process (Rose, 1984); yet, for many writers, confronting writer's block often involves engaging the body through sensations, feelings, movement, and action. However, these considerations have not yet impacted our…