The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasize disciplinary literacy by making literacy instruction every teacher's responsibility (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The CCSS require content area teachers to adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support disciplinary literacy…

This yearlong ethnographic case study investigated higher and lower track adolescents' experiences with core content-area (social studies, science, and math) writing in one urban working-class district. Teacher, student, and administrator interviews; field notes; and students' written work comprised the data set. The findings from this…

Reflecting effective and psychomotor skills to teaching environment are as important as cognitive skills in learning process. In this context, values are important to develop skills in affective domain. In this study, the opinions of the students who have been studying in three different countries (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey) were aimed to be…

Features five poems written by children in five different classrooms in central Illinois. Describes how each class approached their writing assignments in response the attacks of September 11, 2001. (SG)

Intended to familiarize persons with the scoring standards and criteria used for the 8th grade version of the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Writing Test, this scoring manual is in eight sections: (1) an introduction to the scoring dimensions and scale points; (2) definitions of the four scale points; (3) definitions of scoring dimensions and…

Describes using music with eighth-grade students for generating story ideas to write about. (SR)

Describes how, after studying the Holocaust and other human-rights issues in their eighth-grade language-arts classes, students felt compelled to create a permanent memorial and reminder. Discusses how the project unfolded from finding and shaping an idea, collecting stories from around the nation, crafting the mosaic and the flower garden, and…

The writing samples presented in this paper were selected from the portfolios of eighth-grade Vermont students as examples of the various points in Vermont's newly revised analytic writing assessment guide. The benchmark writing pieces in the paper, when used with the analytic assessment guide that begins the paper, are guideposts for assessing…

This report reviews and analyzes the results of the third statewide analytical writing assessment of Oregon eighth graders. Following an introduction, the report is in five chapters: (1) The Oregon Writing Assessment Interpretive Panel: Comments and Recommendations; (2) Strengths and Weaknesses in Student Writing--A Trait-by-Trait Analysis (giving…

Describes a six-week poetry writing workshop for an eighth-grade class. Discusses getting started, two weeks of immersion in reading poetry, students writing their own poetry, creating a community of poets in the classroom, evaluation, students' poetry, and what the teacher learned. Notes that students gained a much richer understanding of poetry.…

Describes the use of character journals (a written diary kept by the reader who assumes the role of the main character) with a group of eighth-grade students. Shows how students think more about what they are reading and come away with a better sense of their own identity. (SR)

This guide presents scoring criteria, the writing prompt, and sample student papers for the grade 8 end of grade persuasive/argumentative composition statewide writing achievement test. The introductory section presents background information on statewide writing tests in North Carolina, scoring writing samples, and the scoring process. The next…

This packet assists teachers and students in preparing for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) Grade 5 and 8 Writing Assessments. Sections of the packet are: Map of the Regional Network for Communications Arts (including local contacts); Calendar of Professional Development Events; Annotated Bibliography of Recommended Resources;…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1998 Writing Assessment measured student writing performance at the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. Scoring guides for three different writing purposes for each grade allowed scorers to objectively evaluate students' work. This issue of NAEPfacts includes an 8th-grade informative writing scoring…

Using children's picture books, Deborah Dean provided frameworks for student research papers that avoided the pitfalls leading to voiceless an encyclopedic writing. Research guide sheets; class analysis of text organization, sentence variety, stylistic choices; and peer review all contribute to interesting final papers. (Contains 2 figures.)