This article seeks answers to questions, such as how children's writing develops and how young students express themselves in writing at various stages of their development. This article reviews the literature through a wide lens as it examines elementary students' writing and is intended to lead to a more comprehensive understanding of…

South Dakota has many things to be proud of: Its students consistently outperform their peers on national assessments. The state has a high graduation rate, and it ranks among the top states in the nation for students going on to postsecondary. Credit for these achievements goes to the state's local school districts. This annual report covers key…

The education of under-prepared college students is a topic that interested and motivated this researcher to conduct a study on learning communities and measuring change in writing apprehension and locus of control of developmental students at a community college. Higher education is generally viewed as a place for the intellectually elite.…

Blog technology is a potential medium for encouraging reflective writing through self-expression and interactive exchange through social networking. This paper reports on a study using blogs as out-of-class assignments for the development of learners' language competence. The study involved seventeen university students at advanced level who kept…

Effects of a 1-semester professional development (PD) intervention that included expert coaching with Head Start teachers were investigated in a randomized controlled trial with 88 teachers and 759 children. Differential effects of technologically mediated (remote) versus in-person (on-site) delivery of individualized coaching with teachers also…

Students in UAE Model Schools exhibit poor writing skills. Samples of some of the essays they came up with bear clear evidence of the problems they have with writing in particular and place them at an increased risk for literacy failure. The data I gathered by means of questionnaires and interviews with teachers and students alike suggest that the…

This article explores the perspective of parents regarding their elementary children's writing in one rural, elementary school. During the research, thematic strands emerged indicating that parents may value their children's writing for purposes that differ from the purposes deemed appropriate by the school. Upon interviewing 30 parents/guardians,…

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR), an online program that purportedly helps students develop as writers and critical thinkers, is being increasingly used by science educators. CPR is an enticing tool since it does not require instructors to grade student writing, and instructors can adopt assignments directly from a library. To determine the extent to…

This study reports on the experiences of an instructor and an undergraduate class who used blogs in their teaching and learning environment at Abant Izzet Baysal University, Turkey. Qualitative data were collected from observation of students' activities when working on blogs in the classroom, analyses of students' blog documents on the web, and…

Employers seek job candidates with critically thinking abilities, great written and oral communication skills, and honesty, among other characteristics. Research supports the need to develop those qualities and business faculty are charged with the task of developing and improving them. As a result faculty are continually searching for new and…

This paper provides information on a measure that was developed to assess children's level of development at preschool and entry to school level, as well as their readiness for formal schooling. This measure--"Who Am I?"--is based on early copying and writing skills and is designed to identify the broad stages of development that underlie…

This investigation aims to assess awareness of genre and writing skills among science students via an abstract writing task, with recall and follow-up protocols to monitor the students, and to characterize the relationship between the abstract and the base article. Abstract writing involves specific data selection techniques of activities involved…

Technology is a way of life for most Americans. A recent study published by the National Writing Project (2007) found that Americans believe that computers have a positive effect on writing skills. The importance of learning to use technology ranked just below learning to read and write, and 74 percent of the survey respondents noted that children…

This article describes a task that engages students in the process of creating word problems. Difficulties in having students write problems are described, along with strategies for overcoming these difficulties. Student work and teacher reactions are included.