In this article, the author discusses a four-part exercise called "To the Moon!" The exercise encourages students to develop and orally defend their choice of four volunteers who will be part of a team to colonize Earth's moon. This oral exercise prepares them for subsequent written work. As Bean (1996, 7) states, "Good writing...grows out of good…

Curriculum integration is defined as students choosing topics to study based on their questions. Several middle schools throughout the United States offer students the opportunity to develop the curriculum during the year based on their questions about themselves and about the world. The author provides the rationale, the developmental reasons…

Effective writing is a learned skill, required to advance many forms of learning both in classroom contexts, and in job and career contexts. Previous research (Graham & Perin, 2007) has identified many strategies that promote improvements in students' writing through a meta-analysis of research studies and previous meta-analyses. Other authors…

Undergraduate and graduate students come to the writing center for consultations with peer tutors in order to improve their communication skills. During peer tutoring sessions (over the course of one semester) it became clear that these students were meeting with the tutors that I supervised, for more than just help with their writing. I observed…

Ever since discovering the New Zealand (NZ) approach to writing Learning Stories the author has been struck by its value on many different levels. Margaret Carr (2001) and her NZ colleagues created this approach, not only as a way to assess desirable outcomes, but as a means to strengthen practitioners' ability to use documentation as a tool for…

Investigations into the effect of providing corrective feedback on L2 writing have often produced contradictory results. This study, following a line of research concerned with the role of corrective feedback in writing, contributes to this line of research by analyzing different feedback types in an EFL academic writing context. 45 graduate…

A growing body of research supports the use of self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) to improve the writing skills of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). This single subject multiple baseline, multiple probe design study extends this research base by investigating the effects of peer-revision instruction on the persuasive…

This executive position paper proposes recommendations for the development of editing workshops and editing training for adjunct faculty of Wilmington University. An editing workshop was developed and taught to two groups of adjunct instructors at Wilmington University. Surveys distributed to the adjuncts after the workshops provide relevant data…

This study investigated effects of background music on writing performance of nine 6th grade students with learning disabilities at one suburban public elementary school in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. A single-subject A-B-A design was utilized, and results from graded writing prompts with and without background music over 21…

A common approach for demonstrating learning in online classrooms is through submittal of research essays of a discussion topic followed by classroom participation. Issues arose at an online campus of a university regarding the originality and quality of critical thinking in the original submittals. Achievement of new course objectives oriented to…

Journalism students can no longer focus on being just writers or photographers or videographers. They must leave college with a multitude of media skills to have the greatest potential for career success. The development of the iPad and supporting apps has created a "one-stop shop" of journalistic tools that enable students to learn…

The error-correction program "Criterion" provides students with an immediate essay feedback using tools that can analyze and review writing automatically. This feedback covers grammar, usage, mechanics, style, organization, and development. With its diagnostic tools for scoring essays and offering relevant feedback, the error-correction…

"Using Comic Art to Improve Speaking, Reading and Writing" uses children's interest in pictures, comics and graphic novels as a way of developing their creative writing abilities, reading skills and oracy. The book's underpinning strategy is the use of comic art images as a visual analogue to help children generate, organise and refine their ideas…

This exploratory study aims to analyse the nature of teacher feedback during a collaborative writing assignment, and to identify the possible effects feedback has on the revision of a text written by university students in an asynchronous online learning environment. Under analysis are three editions of a master's course in e-learning, during…

Academics experience difficulty in managing competing tasks, particularly in relation to writing for publication. In a study conducted on a writing retreat, analysis of data obtained from academic writers revealed that facilitative leadership provided at a writing retreat was central to managing task complexity and writing-related anxiety. The…