Your students may not realize it, but they're already writers. All those informal text messages, Instagram captions, and Facebook posts have given them skills they can use as a springboard to the formal, content-specific writing they'll need for success in school, college, and careers. The key, of course, is practice--plus a little guidance from…

Based on Bowden's (1993) notion of containment, this study analyzes how containment--as well as other pedagogical restrictions and limitations--was manifested in the high-school-to-college transition of first year student writers. This study addresses the following questions of inquiry: "How do participants' experiences in high school affect…

Designed to gauge the actions, skills, and strategies that students use to identify, extract, and synthesize information from multiple source materials, integrated writing tasks are particularly challenging for ESL writers. Previous research tended to focus on a limited number of integrated tasks, mostly summaries of one or two sources, thus…

Writing is a critical skill for success in all areas of life, but it is one of the least taught skills in school. Teachers consistently report being unprepared to teach writing. In this study, set in a Southern U.S. boomtown, teachers received two days of practice-based professional development for a ten-week implementation of self-regulated…

The ability to write is fundamental for learning and achievement across Grades K-12, performance in the workplace, continuing education, college, personal development, and addressing social justice. The majority of our students, however, are not capable writers. We have a body of evidence-based practices (EBPs) and best practices that can make a…

Over the past two decades, writing studies scholars have continually stressed the importance of fostering the development of student metacognition in the writing classroom. Not only does the development of a metacognitive awareness of the writing process help students to become stronger writers, it also allows them to more successfully transfer…

As part of a larger project, this study explores Vietnamese college students' use and concepts of cohesive devices in writing. Cohesion is a crucial element that ties components of a text together. Although the use of cohesive devices in L2 writing has been investigated by a large body of research, there is no such study exploring the effects of…

This article is an expanded version of my presentation to Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association for the Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education in 2019. It provides an overview of research conducted by colleagues and I that examined the following four topics: (a)…

This article argues that we are living in a climate where trauma is taxing students and teachers alike. In order to teach and learn in this moment, we recommend and explore a variety of contemplative practices to help teach awareness and kind attention. Some of these practices involve writing and others don't, as writing itself can be a source of…

This research project aims to understand the multimodal composing practices and social relationships within the context of my third-grade writing workshop when an alternate approach to teaching writing is employed. This alternate approach disrupts a traditional workshop as the theory of writing is changed to a theory of making in a multimodal…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain insights from educational leaders who had participated in a larger study and received extensive practice-based professional development on an evidence-based practice, self-regulated strategy development for informative writing. The participants also previously implemented the self-regulated…

There has been substantial research on the effects of metacognitive instruction on improving L2 learners' language skills. However, little is known about the impact of such instruction on improving the effectiveness of L2 students' collaborative writing. To fill this research gap, we conducted a quasi-experimental study to investigate how such an…

This article explores the pedagogical potential of closely reading and writing hardboiled detective fiction in a Canadian secondary English Language Arts classroom. Grounded in narrative theory and co-taught with a local high-school teacher, the unit focused on the cynical narration and stylistic elements of authors like Raymond Chandler and…

Despite the plethora of research on computer-supported collaborative writing, previous studies have failed to provide an adequate analysis of the quality and quantity of multi-authored texts due to the vast amount of unstructured data. This study aims to expand the current research by contributing new perspectives to the understanding of students'…

The present study investigated the profiles of motivational regulation strategies for writing (MRSW) and examined the relationship between learners' use of MRSW and their English writing performance across different profiles. L2 Writing Strategies for Motivational Regulation Questionnaire (L2WSMRQ) was administered to examine the potential…