This descriptive study examined differences in children's text production as a function of the advanced planning strategies they used. A sample of 117 third-grade children engaged in independent advanced planning and then composed a compare-and-contrast essay both before and after receiving a six-week text production fluency intervention. Analyses…

Close to one billion people in the world do not have basic literacy skills. A key challenge is reaching children in the midst of circumstances that make a traditional school-based approach impractical. This chapter will describe a cross-disciplinary, mobile technology approach to literacy education. The Curious Learning approach distributes…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the implementation of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) as a professional development model effective in altering teachers' perceptions of their knowledge and skill in teaching developmental writing in grades K-3. This research is necessary to examine how offering teachers…

Students' basic reading and math skills can decline significantly during the summer months. Most attribute this to the prolonged period during which young students are outside of a structured learning environment (Cooper et al 1996). While summer learning loss occurs among all income groups, the effects are more pronounced for those from…

This article looks at best practices in basic writing instruction in terms of non-traditional audiences and writerly authority. Much conventional wisdom discourages participation in service-learning projects for basic writers because of the assumption that their writing is not yet ready to "go public." Countering this line of thinking, the author…

This study examined the student-level and instruction-level predictors of narrative writing fluency and quality. Participants included 120 third-grade students from 13 classrooms. Student predictors included measures of reading, handwriting, spelling, IQ, grammatical understanding, and gender. Instructional predictors focused on the amount of time…

This article explores the particular challenges and possibilities of service learning pedagogy for basic writers. Because a number of scholars of service learning and basic writing (Adler-Kassner, Arca, and Kraemer) are concerned primarily with developing underprepared students' academic literacies, I investigated how the students in a service…

What do Slinky toys, sign language, clipboards, golf pencils, and a house icon have in common? They all are a part of the author's writing and reading program, which teaches children how to write, and then read what they have written. This book includes: effective strategies that address multiple learning styles; a ready-to-use form for ongoing…