This article focuses on the 2019 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) assessment of student ability in writing. It begins with an overview of the study and its results, then turns to students' use of planning strategies to support their writing. Drawing on research on the association between planning and achievement in writing,…

This article, based on a 2-year study of working strategically with Years 5 to 8 priority learners, concludes that what is effective writing instruction for all students is particularly effective for priority learners. It also suggests, however, that knowing your students well and making adaptations to some dimensions of effective writing…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the viability of blogging over the summer holidays as an intervention to ameliorate the Summer Learning Effect (SLE) in writing. The SLE is the impact on achievement of taking a break from school over summer, and has been documented to affect differentially those students who come from low socioeconomic…

Given the importance of early success in reading and writing, the question of how schools can support children to make progress in these areas is of great interest. This project set out to explore this question by identifying schools that appear to be successful in achieving progress in literacy and asking them how they have gone about this. The…

Writing is a demanding, multidimensional process that is, cognitively and socially, highly complex. Success in writing is vital to success in education and in the workforce. Writing is increasingly used to demonstrate learning through schooling and has the potential to contribute toward understanding and learning in the content areas. The project…