Background: A common approach to assessing students' integrated understanding of multiple documents is to analyse their post-reading written reports. This study investigated to what extent writing self-efficacy directly and indirectly (via integrative processing) contributed to multiple-document comprehension as assessed with an integrative…

The Institute for Education Sciences identifies main idea and summarization instruction as effective practices for improving adolescent students' reading comprehension. Main idea generation is a higher-level comprehension skill that requires students to read the text, connect information across the paragraph or section, determine the most…

Current trends in developmental writing have focused on corequisite support courses that developmental writers take in conjunction with college-level courses. Much recent scholarship has focused on the design of the corequisite course, but a corequisite model also raises the stakes of the curricular design of the college-level course, since it now…

The article presents the results of a randomized experimental study of a writing curriculum for college developmental writing courses based on strategy instruction with self-regulation integrated with practices common in college composition. Students in a full semester course learned strategies for planning and revising based on rhetorical…

The assessment of argumentative writing generally includes analyses of the specific linguistic and rhetorical features contained in the individual essays produced by students. However, researchers have recently proposed that an individual's ability to flexibly adapt the linguistic properties of their writing may more accurately capture their…

Expository writing--the kind of writing that explains and informs--is essential for success in school and the workplace. Students who cannot write at a competent level struggle in college. With the advent of e-mail and the Internet, an increasing number of jobs require solid writing skills. No matter what path students choose in life, the ability…

Research shows that cognitively demanding text-based writing assignments increase students' reading comprehension skills and analytic writing competencies. In this article, we describe the steps that upper-elementary grade teachers can take to develop cognitively demanding assignments that build these higher-level literacy skills and put students…

Retrospective reports gathered from developmental education students as part of a learning assessment revealed the use of several strategies for writing a summary based on a text. Participants were selected for the study based on the richness and variety of their verbal descriptions of task performance in structured, individualized interviews.…

Much research has investigated the role of planning time in second language writing; however, the results show that there are inconsistent findings about the effects of planning time conditions on the complexity of the EFL learners' textual output. The current study attempted to consider the differential effects of planning time conditions in…

Many culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) struggle with the writing process. Particularly, they have difficulties developing and expanding ideas, organizing and elaborating sentences, and revising and editing their compositions (Graham, Harris, & Larsen, 2001; Myles, 2002). Computer graphic…

This study explored the extent to which the reading-to-write construct is the sum of one's reading and writing abilities or an independent construct. The investigation included an analysis of (a) test tasks, (b) the relationship of test task scores and scores on reading and writing measures, and (c) the effects of proficiency level and educational…

A text's meaning is, in part, independent of its form. Reading, most of the time, is taking meaning--not words--from the printed page, while proofreading requires attention to form rather than meaning. The author notes that: (1) a meaningful passage is easier to read than one with less meaning; (2) errors in oral reading usually do not obscure a…

Describes the Reading/Writing Task, a procedure used to assess what students recall and comprehend from their reading but that also guides them to recall, summarize, and react to what they have read. Discusses the activities involved in the task and the evaluation procedure, and outlines the Reading/Writing Task scoring framework. (TJQ)

"Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition"[R] ("CIRC") is a comprehensive reading and writing program for students in grades 2 through 8. It includes story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated reading and language arts activities. Pairs of students (grouped either by or across…

To describe a cross-curriculum writing model designed for a middle school, this paper provides a condensed script of what the designer of the program said and did during its first year to steer the program in a productive direction. The paper is written in the form of exerpts from relevant conversations. The first conversation relates how the idea…