To date, there is no clear evidence to support choosing handwriting over keyboarding or vice versa as the modality children should use when they first learn to write. 102 Norwegian first-grade children from classrooms that used both electronic touchscreen keyboard on a digital tablet and pencil-and-paper for writing instruction wrote narratives in…

Little is known about students' engagement in school writing tasks and the methods that should be used by the researchers to assess this engagement. This exploratory study examines the relationship between the engagement reported by elementary school students (N = 136) in a handwriting and keyboarding activity (Likert scale questionnaire) and…

Writing in a language different from one's mother tongue is a daunting task. The same challenge may apply to languages that have diglossic features whose spoken form differs from the written form. This article investigates Arab students' writing behaviors (fluency, pauses, and revision) in response to an argumentative composition in their L1…

This intervention study aimed to test the effect of writing process feedback. Sixty-five Grade 10 students received a personal report based on keystroke logging data, including information on several writing process aspects. Participants compared their writing process to exemplar processes of equally scoring (position-setting condition) or…

The present study evaluated the effects of web-based training on Spanish pre-service and in-service teacher knowledge and implicit beliefs on learning to write. A sample of pre-service teachers and in-service teachers from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, and Spain participated in the online course. Findings suggest that teachers may improve…

Numerous studies of written language development have shown minimal improvement over the course of an instructional period, yet these solely text-based studies offer little explanation for the lack of changes in writers' language because little is reported about the classroom and the participants. The purpose of this study is to use goal theory to…

Elementary students are expected to engage in written expression that is handwritten and typed. One critical skill of written expression is sentence construction: the composition of multiple words that follow rules of semantics and syntax. Unfortunately, many students with disabilities struggle to successfully handwrite or type complete sentences.…

This study investigates the effects of a scenario-based assessment design on students' writing processes. An experimental data set consisting of four design conditions was used in which the number of scenarios (one or two) and the placement of the essay task with respect to the lead-in tasks (first vs. last) were varied. Students' writing…

In this study of third grade school children, we investigated the association between writing process measures recorded with key stroke logging and the final written product. Moreover, we examined the cognitive predictors of writing process and product measures. Analyses of key strokes showed that while most children spontaneously made local…

Writing training systems have been developed to provide students with instruction and deliberate practice on their writing. Although generally successful in providing accurate scores, a common criticism of these systems is their lack of personalization and adaptive instruction. In particular, these systems tend to place the strongest emphasis on…

The four-week university-sponsored summer Computer-based Writing (CBW) Program directed by the head of a special education initial teacher licensure program gave teaching interns opportunities to work with young struggling writers in a supervised clinical setting to address keyboarding skills, writing conventions and knowledge and application of…

Classroom teachers sometimes struggle trying to find time during the typical school day to provide the writing instruction students need to be successful. This study examined 29 fifth through twelfth grade classroom teachers' survey responses about their perception of the effectiveness of using an online blogging tool, Kidblog, to plan and provide…

This study aimed to describe the writing activities that test takers engage in when responding to the writing tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"[superscript R] test and to examine the effects of task type and test-taker English language proficiency (ELP) and keyboarding skills on the frequency and distribution of these activities. Each of 22 test…

Background: It is well established that handwriting fluency constrains writing quality by limiting resources for higher order processes such as planning and reviewing. According to the "simple view of writing" then slow keyboarding speed should hinder the quality of keyboarded essay compositions in the same way that slow handwriting…

Focusing on ways to teach fourth-grade students the machine skills they need to make the computer a fluent writing tool, this study sought to identify the word processing skills that students need to learn and the ones that are most difficult, and the instructional approaches that work best in teaching word processing skills. The problems and…