There is considerable concern that many adolescents do not attain the writing competence needed to be successful in school, their personal lives, or the workplace. Ensuring that students acquire this competence is a basic responsibility of schools. In order to meet this objective, teachers need access to effective practices for teaching writing.…

The ability to write effectively and use writing as a tool for learning is essential for students' success in the middle grades--and beyond. This practice guide highlights several research-based practices that can be used school-wide to help middle grades students become better writers. This paper presents four questions middle grades educators…

This meta-analysis examined if students' writing performance is improved by reading interventions in studies (k = 54 experiments; 5,018 students) where students were taught how to read and studies (k = 36 investigations; 3,060 students) where students' interaction with words or text was increased through reading or observing others read. Studies…

The current study used a pretest-posttest randomized control group design with 73 Head Start students, ages 3-5 years. The researcher served as the interactive writing teacher for the treatment group, rotating to five different classrooms in one Head Start center 3-4 days a week for 13 weeks. Children in the treatment group received a 10-15 min…

The purpose of this chapter is to gain insight from the ways a group of elementary teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing chose to integrate digital tools into evidence-based writing instruction and the ways these technologies were used to support student learning. After professional development that exposed these teachers to twelve new digital…

In this meta-analysis, the impact of writing interventions on the quality of writing produced by students with learning disabilities (LD) was assessed. Ancestral and electronic searches were used to locate experimental, quasi-experimental, and within-subjects design studies with participants in Grades 1-12 with documented LD. The effects of…

In an effort to identify effective instructional practices for teaching writing to elementary grade students, we conducted a meta-analysis of the writing intervention literature, focusing our efforts on true and quasi-experiments. We located 115 documents that included the statistics for computing an effect size (ES). We calculated an average…

We examined the extent to which strategies instruction, using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model, would enhance the writing, engagement during writing, and behavior of 44 second-grade students identified as having behavioral and writing difficulties. This study occurred within a comprehensive, integrated, three-tiered model of…

Writing performance for a large number of adolescents, with and without learning disabilities (LD), in the United States is below the level required for success in college and in the world of work. Despite the importance of writing and students' with LD documented difficulties in this academic domain, writing intervention research for adolescents…