Prior research has consistently shown that motivation is a catalyst for students' writing performance, with important implications for writing instruction. However, this body of research has mainly relied on a variable-centered approach that does not acknowledge the similarities and differences between and within groups of students. In the current…

Mid-adolescence has been identified as a period of considerable potential growth in the language skills and practices that support reading and writing at school, but little research has examined mid-adolescents' use of connectives in school-relevant persuasive writing. In this study, we define connectives as cohesive devices that signal to a…

Attending to students' thinking and using it to inform instruction has been shown to be an effective and equitable teaching practice. Research on teachers' noticing of thinking conceptualizes noticing as a cognitive process, while work on noticing for equity treats noticing as culturally situated but primarily focuses on participation. Drawing on…

This study explored disciplinary writing in grades 4-6 and the potential of writing to learn and learning to write across the curriculum to prepare the pupils for their future writing. Using Ivanic's discourses of writing as an analytical framework, observation protocols from 104 observers in 374 lessons in 76 Swedish schools were analyzed…

The present study examined elicited written English as a foreign language (EFL) narratives produced by 6th grade Hebrew and Arabic speakers in their 4th year of learning EFL. We examined the use of correct verb morphology and morphosyntactic structures, in relation to supporting L1/EFL skills. Fifty-eight pupils (29 Arabic speakers) participated…

While the merits of dialogic talk for supporting students' learning is well documented, the contribution of specific talk moves on learning outcomes remains less understood. This study was conducted to investigate how student-generated talk moves during whole-classroom discussions, as captured by the Low-Inference Discourse Observation tool,…

Previous work in English has found that the spelling difficulties of children with dyslexia affect the overall quality attributed to their written compositions. The aim of this study was to investigate whether different processes related to transcription, translation and ideas proposing/planning are affected in developmental dyslexia and to what…

Research shows that writing motivation decreases throughout schooling and predicts writing performance. However, this evidence comes primarily from cross-sectional studies. Here, we adopted a longitudinal approach to (a) examine the development of attitudes toward writing, writing self-efficacy domains, and motives to write from Grade 6 to 7, and…

English orthography differs from that of other European languages in terms of complexity and regularity. This difference may impact the development of accurate spelling in English, especially when it is learned as a foreign language in school. In this study we wanted to explore spelling development patterns of Spanish speaking children learning…

This study examined students' ability to select relevant ideas from multiple online texts and integrate those ideas in their written products. Students (N = 162) used a web-based platform to complete an online inquiry task in which they read three texts presenting different perspectives on computer gaming and wrote an article for a school magazine…

With the popularity of robotics education, attention has been drawn to students' perceptions of robots. This study provides a framework to understand students' imagination about and perceptions of robots from four dimensions of robot identity--nature, social, emotional, and evolutionary. We applied the framework on 80 literary products generated…

Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing--biography and report--composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students'…

The current study replicated an earlier investigation by Bouwer and van der Veen (2023) where 10 Grade 5 and 6 classrooms in the Netherlands (210 students) were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition, with treatment students evidencing improvements in the quality of their essays after practice writing argumentative essays, reading…

As schools reopened in the fall of 2021, educators faced pressure to fill in learning gaps created by unfinished learning. Findings from a qualitative case study of elementary school teachers show that at times teachers felt constrained by the limitations of teaching writing in an online environment; therefore, they were excited about returning to…

One aim of this article is to shift mindsets from the traditional identification of written language abilities that are "missing" in students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) to writing assessment as the discovery of more complex language strengths foundational to success across disciplines. The multiple language-levels (MLL)…