The Innovation Schools Act of 2008, (§ 22-32.5-102, C.R.S. et.seq) was created in response to district and school leaders' interest in finding a way for districts to develop and implement innovative practices in a wide variety of areas for the purpose of improving student outcomes. The Act provides a formal process that allows schools to petition…

Writing is a demanding, multidimensional process that is, cognitively and socially, highly complex. Success in writing is vital to success in education and in the workforce. Writing is increasingly used to demonstrate learning through schooling and has the potential to contribute toward understanding and learning in the content areas. The project…

Since writing ability has been found to be an important predictor of school success and college readiness, it is important for teachers to understand the connections between students' attitudes toward writing, writing self-efficacy, and writing achievement. This article describes the findings from focus groups conducted with 81 students in grades…

National estimates of students' writing abilities in the United States indicate that in 2002, 72% of elementary-aged students were unable to write with grade-level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). Although performance feedback is one type of intervention that improves students' writing skills, no study to date has examined…

Argumentation can contribute significantly to content area learning. Recent research has raised questions about the effects of discussion (deliberation) goals versus persuasion (disputation) goals on reasoning and learning. This is the first study to compare the effects of these writing goals on individual writing to learn. Grade 7 and 8 students…

In this report, we examine the feasibility of characterizing writing performance using process features derived from a keystroke log. Using data derived from a set of "CBAL"™ writing assessments, we examine the following research questions: (a) How stable are the keystroke timing and process features across testing occasions?; (b) How…

High levels of apprehension cause students to have writing difficulties. This study attempted to identify the sources of Egyptian university students' English writing apprehension. The study made use of both quantitative and qualitative data. The scores of 57 students on a writing apprehension scale were compared to their scores on another scale…

The purpose of this work is to analyze the name writing and writing readiness levels of preschoolers in terms of various variables and to identify the relationship between children's name writing skill and writing readiness levels. To that end, name-writing and writing-readiness skills of 204 preschoolers at the ages of 3, 4 and 5 were examined…

Exploring Longitudinal Outcomes and Trajectories of English Language Learners (ELOTE) is a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership between WestEd and the Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD). ELOTE addresses a key gap in knowledge about the outcomes and trajectories of immigrant newcomers who enroll in the ninth grade. The purpose of the…

This research explores the differences in revenue reported after accounting for charter funds passing through district budgets between Florida's traditional schools and charter schools at both the state level and the individual district level. Differences in the percentage of the revenues the schools are expending on instructional services are…

The current study set out to compare the effect of traditional and non-traditional instructional treatments; i.e. explicit, implicit, task-based and no-instruction approaches on students' abilities to learn how to write classified ads. 72 junior students who have all taken a course in Reading Journalistic Texts at the Payame-Noor University…

The alarming results of large studies such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012) point to an urgent need for writing support and call for specific and effective methods to foster writing competencies. The main purpose of this paper is to describe an innovative peer-assisted…

The number of the studies conducted on the use of wikis on the English as a foreign language (EFL) learning process has remained fairly limited. More specifically, in the Turkish EFL context, little attention has been paid to the effects of wikis on EFL writing achievement. Thus, this study aims to examine the effects of a wiki-based writing…

In 2015, Fong, Finkelstein, Jaeger, Diaz, and Broek reported the findings from an independent evaluation of the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC). The evaluation found positive and statistically significant effects of the ERWC on student achievement. Due to some concerns that the previously reported results in Fong et al. (2015) did not…

Dyslexia is considered a learning disorder characterized by difficulty in learning to read, write, and spell despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence, and sociocultural opportunities (TEC§38.003 cited in Texas Education Agency, 2014). The Texas Education Code (TEC) §38.003 makes provision for the evaluation and identification of…