The purpose of this study is to explore the children's understanding of moon phase changes. Study methods include qualitative and quantitative methods. The subjects of the study are 683 students from grade three to six in an elementary school in New Taipei City. This study uses the method of writing assessment to explore the ideas of elementary…

Good writers don't wing it--they have a plethora of skills. They list, picture, circle, strategize and revise to make language come alive. They know what to use and when. Like ace athletes, they are highly trained, well-versed in the techniques found in this lively book. "Writing Workouts" provides a method for instruction that gives…

This dissertation is rooted in three strands of scholarship: translingual approaches to writing (Horner et al., 2011), social design-based experiments (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010) as a subset of participatory design-based research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), and the Learning on the Move framework centering embodied and mobile epistemologies…

Educators expect that students be able to make informed decisions about science-related problems in their everyday lives. Engaging science in such problems often entails evaluating available evidence for given arguments. This study explores how students use inscriptions as evidence to argue about socioscientific issues. Fifth- and sixth-grade…

This study aimed to describe 1-year changes in students' vocabulary in written narratives. Secondary aims included examination of accuracy and the relationship between lexical diversity and achievement. Participants included 749 students in first through eighth grades. Within-subjects 1-year change in diversity, productivity, and accuracy was…

This article presents a case study on the use of expressivist writing pedagogy as a practice of identity construction for an adolescent Chinese-Speaking English Language Learner (ELL) in a 6-12, college preparatory, international boarding school context. The study implements a narrative inquiry/content analysis framework to analyze themes of…

As an intimidating school subject for students globally, writing requires a high level of motivation, especially for second language (L2) learners. Despite abundant research on motivation in both first language (L1) writing and L2 learning, L2 writing motivation warrants more attention. To bridge the gap, the study intends to present an overall…

Middle school social studies teachers are increasingly working on argument writing in their classrooms so that students can successfully write counterarguments that acknowledge competing perspectives about historical and social issues by the end of eighth grade. The authors' prior research indicates that eighth-grade students "can" grow…

Facilitating meaningful discourse directly supports what students should be able to do with respect to the third of the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP 3) in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010): "Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others" (p. 6). Following best…

In a case study conducted in a biology class in Slovenia, six grade students participated in a biology project Writing Versus Typing in a Biology Class. The final task in this project was to write a chapter for a biology textbook with the title Urtica dioica. The task was performed twice: firstly, the text was written by the hand and secondly it…

Automated writing evaluation systems can improve students' writing insofar as students attend to the feedback provided and revise their essay drafts in ways aligned with such feedback. Existing research on revision of argumentative writing in such systems, however, has focused on the types of revisions students make (e.g., surface vs. content)…

Literacy is an important result of language teaching. Language skills are like the pieces of a whole. The accurate acquisition of these skills, which are needed to be used effectively by individuals both in their social and educational life, is equally valuable. Writing is a skill that is acquired and developed mostly during the learning process…

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy.…

Researchers have established that solid argumentation is essential for developing, establishing and communicating mathematical knowledge, which attracted substantial attention from researchers, but few have simultaneously investigated the argumentation performance of sixth-graders and their teacher's potential influence in Chinese rural…

The present study explored negotiated interaction with Grade 6 students (age 11-12) engaged in communicative tasks supported by Club Penguin Island, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Unlike previous studies on digital games, the present study assessed the use of Club Penguin Island during face-to-face interaction.…