Children's increasing expertise in composition relies partly on word choice. Little is known about how children consider words as they write, their meta-lexical awareness, or about their choice of words for writing. In this study, we investigate children's meta-lexical awareness, as one aspect of their metalinguistic awareness, which guides their…

Results from national and state writing assessments suggest teachers struggle to meet the writing needs of students with disabilities as they score significantly lower than the overall population. With the implementation of Common Core State Standards in 2010, text-based writing became increasingly important for academic success both in the…

The Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT-4) is the latest iteration of a popular instrument that psychologists employ to assess academic achievement. The WIAT-4 authors make both pragmatic and measurement claims about the instrument. The pragmatic claims involve being useful for identifying individuals in certain academic achievement-related…

Pedagogical shifts that incorporate multimodal and digital literacies challenge the world in which literacy teachers have lived and worked. Effective professional development (PD) experiences may increase teachers' knowledge and enlarge their teaching paradigms about writing instruction. The current study explored ways PD might encourage teachers…

Task design has been viewed to be essential in the context of language assessment. This study investigated whether increasing task complexity affects learners' writing performance. It employs three writing tasks with different levels of complexity based on Robinson's Componential Framework. A cohort of 278 participants was selected using a simple…

This programme evaluation study examined the changes in writing motivation, self-regulation and integrated writing task scores of international students over the course of a pre-sessional course on English for academic purposes (EAP). In addition, the study also investigated the relationship between writing task motivation, self-regulation, and…

Enrollment in dual credit classes has increased over the last 10 years benefiting K-20 education and high school students in providing an opportunity to obtain college credits and increasing postsecondary education enrollment. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictors of achievement through the lens of Social Cognitive Theory by…

Identifying effective and time-efficient approaches to teaching students how to write from scholarly sources benefits students and instructors. Students in a general psychology course learned a concrete method to improve this type of synthesis writing. The intervention was brief, consisting of viewing an online tutorial outside of class and…

This study attempted to discern the factor structure of the achievement goal orientation and goal structure constructs across the domain-specific task of essay writing in an Iranian EFL context. A convenience sample of 116 public university learners participated in a single-session, in-class study of an essay writing sampling and an immediate…

This study explored possible reasons why IELTS candidates usually score low in writing by investigating the effects of two different test designs and scoring criteria on Iranian IELTS candidates' obtained grades in IELTS and World Englishes (WEs) essay writing tests. To this end, first, a WEs essay writing test was preliminarily designed. Then, 17…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between high school students' athletics participation, mediated by engagement, and their academic achievement. The study sought to determine if increased athletics participation, and a self-reported increased sense of engagement at school, resulted in higher SAT test scores for high school…

This study examined the phenomenon of college readiness in Hispanic first-generation college students. The purpose of this study was to determine if a relationship exists between first-generation Hispanic student participation in an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) elective course and college readiness. The researchers used logistic…

English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing is challenging for students due to the lack of related lexical resources to inspire them for meaningful writing besides grammar feedback. Moreover, it is crucial to design personalized feedback based on students' original writings in helping to improve their writing abilities. Therefore, we developed Smart…

The increasing number of children who struggle with reading and writing has become a significant challenge for the nation's public schools. The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the relationship between which intervention a student gets and ELA scores of the online reading program i-Ready compared to the Word Generation program in…

The Houston Independent School District offers two primary bilingual programs (transitional and dual language) for Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs). The relative amount of instruction in each language depends on both program and grade level. Students in the transitional bilingual program have the option of entering a "pre-exit…