Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically…

Theories of writing development posit several component skills as necessary to the writing process. This meta-analysis synthesizes the literature on the correlation between these proposed component skills and writing outcomes. Specifically, in this study, we examine the bivariate relationships between handwriting fluency, spelling, reading, and…

Theories of writing development posit several component skills as necessary to the writing process. This meta-analysis synthesizes the literature on the correlation between these proposed component skills and writing outcomes. Specifically, this study examines the bivariate relationship of handwriting fluency, spelling, reading, and oral language…

Struck by his students' often hostile and apathetic responses to assignments and instruction and hoping to contribute to the knowledge of motivation, Dan LaSalle began to take an inquiry stance on his own practice. He studied his practice on three fronts with the help of an off-site teacher research group: (1) how his inquiry question changes as a…

This exploratory study was designed to assess the experience of preservice teachers when integrating written language technology and their likelihood of applying that technology in their future classrooms. Results suggest that after experiencing technology integration, preservice teachers are more likely to use it in their future teaching.

When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of…

Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths' consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension--and pedagogical potential--of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial…

This paper studies and suggests the need for writing instruction by which students can experience writing as a creative process in exploring and communicating meaning. The prewriting activities generate ideas which can encourage a free flow of thoughts and help students discover both what they want to say and how to say it on paper. Through the…

While "transfer" has become, in recent years, a subject of great research interest to our field, we still have much to learn about how we can best use this research knowledge to inform local efforts in program development. In this profile, we describe the foundations of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and explain how…

The author integrates work from cognitive and developmental psychology with studies in writing in order to explain why the quality of student writing sometimes appears to regress to earlier or less proficient levels. Insights from this combined analysis are applied to explain how and why to use specific Writing Across the Curriculum strategies to…

Teacher candidates have few opportunities during their teacher preparation coursework to investigate practices associated with eliciting and responding to student writing. This article describes an attempt to address this problem with a searchable online digital archive of student writing, with and without teachers' written feedback, as well…

This paper defines the concept of "improvement infrastructure" and "educational capital" for education, and it uses the case of the National Writing Project to develop an extended, data-based illustration of the design and generativeness of an improvement infrastructure. Since 1983 there have been multiple "waves" of…

Questions the required use of over-sized pencils as writing implements in kindergarten. Evaluates eight writing samples written with eight tools of different sizes and shapes. Reports no noticeable differences in the conventionality (form) of the letters, in directionality, or in spelling. (KEH)

Examines the writing assignments and instruction in 30 introductory literature textbooks. Finds three types of writing assignments: the "ever popular" critical paper, the expressive paper, and the literary paper. Presents excerpts of student papers to demonstrate that writing on expressive and literary topics can help students see the…

Argues that children's points of view shape knowledge in the classroom and are central to the development of children's writing and learning. Finds points of view by referring to examples of talk and writing; explains how cultural and personal factors come into play; and proposes that points of view become an explicit aspect of instruction,…