All faculty regardless of discipline or school need to be highly competent at writing for an academic audience. The "publish or perish" pressure is alive and well for academic advancement, publications, and external grant funding. Yet few faculty, particularly in the health professions and sciences, receive formal training on the craft…

Early status reports on WAC call for engagement with the disciplines, robust research about writing, and a transformation from missionary work to a more wide-ranging model. A Taxonomy of WAC describes common characteristics of WAC programs as well as organizing those characteristics into a progression from initiation to change agency. (Contains 1…

Explicitly and systematically teaching strategies for planning and drafting specific types of text has improved the writing of elementary and middle school students with disabilities in previous studies. In this investigation, we examined the effect of teaching a planning and drafting strategy for persuasive writing to high school students with…

Learning outcomes for introductory college-level science classes include content knowledge and a range of critical thinking and analysis skills. In this context, rich writing assignments that engage students in researching content, constructing arguments, and critiquing other students' work are highly desirable but unwieldy due to large…

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is a novel intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that offers writing strategy instruction, game-based practice, essay writing practice, and formative feedback to developing writers. Compared to more tractable and constrained learning domains for ITS, writing is an ill-defined domain because the features of effective writing are…

Writing centers in American institutions of higher education have existed in one form or another since the late 1800s and early 1900s, providing individualized writing tutoring and support for students. As writing centers evolved, questions arose regarding the effects of writing tutoring on student writing. Some assessment studies on writing…

This paper examines the issue of struggling readers and writers, and offers suggestions to help teachers increase struggling students' motivation and metacognition. Suggestions include multisensory methods that make use of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning pathways, as well as explicit strategy instruction to improve students' ability…

In this high-accountability era--one in which there is an expanding movement to condemn teachers for the failures of their schools--teachers teach students who believe writing is primarily an act of complying to a prompt, likely for a state accountability assessment or the troubling 25-minute essay that constitutes less than half of the writing…

This article draws on early data from a two-year project (2009-11) being undertaken in the New Zealand context by the authors entitled: "Teachers as Writers: Transforming Professional Identity and Classroom Practice". Based on the National Writing Project in the USA (and in New Zealand in the 1980s) its hypothesis is that when teachers…

This paper reports on a pilot study designed to develop writing proficiency in French via collaborative writing activities at intermediate level at the University of Wollongong in Australia. Twenty four students in the final year of French studies program took part in this innovative approach which integrates multimodal functionality of the…

Many writing teachers provide feedback to their students through writing conferences; however, the existing literature indicates teachers may unintentionally harm their weaker students by using this strategy. To better understand the effect of the writing conference on developmental writing students, the researcher created a mixed design ANCOVA to…

Teaching skills, knowledge and abilities appropriate for career-ready graduates and assessing learning are complex issues. Developing a valid and reliable approach is often by trial and error. Instead, the authors employed Deming's PDCA Cycle of continuous improvement as a systematic procedure to incrementally move closer to their goal. This paper…

According to the authors, five years ago their school district embraced Understanding by Design as the organizing framework for curriculum. The emphasis on enduring understandings and essential questions led the sixth grade social studies teachers to reevaluate what they were teaching in their World History Curriculum. Together the authors worked…

Many victims of childhood maltreatment experience difficulties in school and with academic performance. This article reviews the evidence on the connection between childhood maltreatment and school performance and presents an evaluation of a unique program established by Children's Services in Lorain County, Ohio. Since 2001, the School Success…

This study examined gains in written language as assessed by targeted curriculum-based measures (CBMs), and explored how these gains were affected by moderator variables of specific cognitive functions and student subgroups. The sample included 68 second grade students who were at risk for writing disabilities. Handwritten compositions were…