Many high schools in the United States are contending with modest student writing achievement and looking for ways to enhance teachers' writing instruction. This is especially the case for schools deemed to be "underperforming" and struggling to reform writing pedagogy against an accumulation of teacher and leadership turnover, limited…

As struggling Australian students may not typically receive additional support beyond the mainstream English classroom, more needs to be understood about the staffing and resourcing challenges that may impede secondary English teachers seeking to support these students. Data from the 2019 "Supporting Struggling Secondary Literacy…

This study explores older adolescents' linguistic resources, specifically academic vocabulary knowledge, in the context of factors that can impact their academic success and risk of dropping out of school. The data resulted from a collaboration among professional development personnel, teachers, and university researchers. Eleventh and twelfth…

The lament that "students can't write" remains loud and defiant, even after years of research pointing to the myriad factors that make students' writing challenging, particularly when they move into university. This paper reports on a longitudinal, ethnographic study which explored students' writing "in transition," from…

Many of the more than 700,000 students who leave U.S. high schools each year without a diploma have low literacy skills. More than 60 percent of eighth graders and 60 percent of twelfth graders scored below the "proficient" level in reading achievement according to the most recent administrations of the National Assessment of Educational…

Background: Despite much discussion on the role of education policy on school and student performance, we know little about the effects of school spending at the margin on student cognitive achievement beyond the effects of class size. Purpose: The paper examines the effects of annual ninth grade classroom hours in literacy and maths on ninth…

More high school students today are graduating college-ready, career-ready or both, thanks to an emphasis by modern business and industry, strong support from states and more rigorous learning experiences at schools across the nation. It has been said many times, but now it is sinking in. From hospitals to factories, employees need to know how to…

Adolescent literacy, or adolescents' ability to read, write, and communicate about the variety of texts they encounter in and out of school, has remained inordinately, and consistently, low for the past 20 years (NCES, 2010). Self-efficacy is a widely-used construct for measuring and predicting student achievement (Pajares, Johnson, & Usher,…

Literacy instruction does not end with reading success in early grades. As students move to middle and high school, new challenges emerge that can affect literacy achievement. Even for students who achieve early reading and writing success, the literacy demands of middle and high school can pose substantial challenges. Older students must be able…