Education consultant Samantha Bennett describes an inquiry unit in which 2nd graders practice the habits of lepidopterists to learn about butterflies and to create a literary nonfiction story that incorporated their butterfly research. She takes the reader through the teacher's process of planning this unit, including choosing the "4…

Effective feedback is an essential tool for making learning explicit and an essential feature of classroom practice that promotes learner autonomy. Yet, it remains a pressing challenge for teachers to scaffold the active involvement of students as critical, reflective and autonomous learners who use feedback constructively. This paper seeks to…

This study examined the number of writing samples needed to obtain a reliable estimate of young struggling writers' capabilities. It further assessed if performance in one genre was reflective of performance in other genres for these children. Second- and third-grade students (81 boys, 56 girls), who were identified as struggling writers in need…

English language learners (ELLs) bring a wealth of knowledge to science classrooms, yet often that knowledge is untapped by traditional instruction and assessment. As classrooms become increasingly diverse, it is critical to recognize the depth of understandings ELLs bring to classrooms to explain the scientific world around them. English language…

Weblogs or blogging may foreground audience needs for a written work and help novice authors grow in audience awareness and elicit and use audience feedback. A case study of a second-grade classroom compared students' growing audience awareness and the ways they addressed audience needs. Analysis of student written work, students' comments to…

The purpose of this study was to investigate predictors of early writing for low-income, urban students. Drawing on research and theory characterizing literacy development as a complex, integrative process, the author analyzed growth in the descriptive writing of students in Grades 1-3. The participants were 309 low-income children enrolled in 16…