Understanding students' progress towards meeting grade-level expectations within an academic year is the goal of many education stakeholders so that they can make decisions to adjust instruction and improve students' learning trajectories. The purpose of this study was to explore 4th and 5th grade students' progress towards meeting expectations in…

Machines have a long-demonstrated ability to find statistical relationships between qualities of texts and surface-level linguistic indicators of writing. More recently, unlocked by artificial intelligence, the potential of using machines to identify content-related writing trait criteria has been uncovered. This development is significant,…

The purpose of the study was to discover the pathways and roadblocks that lead to ELLs' writing abilities in fourth grade after transitioning from a bilingual to a general education classroom. This research compared students' data points in Dual Language classes on state assessments and the writing strategies implemented by Dual Language teachers.…

Mathematics standards expect students to communicate about mathematics using oral and written methods, and some high-stakes assessments ask students to answer mathematics questions by writing. Assumptions about mathematics communication via writing include (a) students possess writing skill, (b) students can transfer this writing skill to…

This collaborative research was carried out among 197 elementary school students, in the context of a rural Canadian school of the Quebec province. Several students of the school presented learning difficulties, mostly in writing. The teachers and the learning specialist decided to differentiate the groups in special subgroups of needs that met…

The current study examines data from students in grades 4-8 who participated in a statewide computer-based benchmark writing assessment that featured automated essay scoring and automated feedback. We examined whether the use of automated feedback was associated with gains in writing quality across revisions to an essay, and with transfer effects…

One area of writing that may be particularly problematic for less skilled writers and writers with learning disabilities is constructing well-formed sentences. In this single-subject design study, sentence-combining practice with a peer-assistance component was used to improve the writing ability of 6 fourth-grade students with and without…

One ingredient that may serve as a catalyst for writing development is changes in writing knowledge. This study assessed the veracity of two tenets underlying this proposal: that skilled writers are more knowledgeable than less skilled writers, and that individual differences in knowledge are related to writing performance. Both of these…