This study examines the epistemic disciplinary knowledge that students consider when addressing a real food emergency that requires their engagement in inquiry and argumentation practices. The study comprised two phases: (1) designing an experiment to study the emergency and (2) evaluating the real outcome of the emergency. The participants were…

Sustainability has become a prominent theme in society and can be considered as an integral part of scientific citizenship. This study investigates to what extent the production, use and re-use of (bio)plastics initiates students' reasoning and to identify the kind of content knowledge students put forward. The structure of students' arguments was…

Purpose: Persuasive communication skills are vital for achieving success in school, at work, and in social relationships. To facilitate assessment of persuasive discourse, we developed a clinically feasible persuasive speaking protocol and used it to compile a database of language samples. This database allowed us to describe the properties of…

This study aims at investigating students' awareness of green chemistry principles (GCPs) which are infused in two context-based projects that are related to socio-scientific issues, namely climate change and materials' recycling. At first, content analysis of the projects' activities showed the infusion of four GCPs. Subsequently, the students'…

The study aims to understand psychological processes relevant to learning argumentative writing in high school. Multi-group path analysis was used to explore whether self-efficacy mediates the relationship between writing anxiety and use of self-regulation across students with different goal orientation profiles. A cluster analysis identified…

Linguistic properties of writing prompts have been shown to influence the writing patterns contained in student essays. The majority of previous research on these prompt-based effects has focused on the lexical and syntactic properties of writing prompts and essays. The current study expands this research by investigating the effects of prompt…

Proficiency in writing increases opportunities in higher education, employment, and social relationships. Many students in the United States, however, are struggling writers. In particular, the writing performance of students with disabilities in secondary grades continues to lag behind grade level peers. The purpose of this article was to review…

The study applied the Multi-Dimensional analysis used by Biber (1988) to examine the functional parameters of essays. Co-occurrence patterns were identified within an essay corpus (n=1529) using a linguistic indices provided by Co-Metrix. These patterns were used to identify essay groups that shared features based upon situational parameters.…

This study examined the effectiveness of persuasive writing instruction using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model with high school students identified with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Using a multiple baseline design across participants, four students in grades 10 and 11 received one-to-one instruction in…

One path to improving adolescents' literacy skills is to integrate reading and writing into the content areas in which such work occurs. Although argumentative writing has been found to help students understand historical content and transform information, scholars do not know the influence of specific task structures on students' writing or…

This document presents the proceedings of the 23nd Annual Research Forum held June 28, 2018, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 12 action research papers: (1) Standards-Based Grading in a Secondary Mathematics Classroom (Michelle Anderson); (2) How the Use of Graphic Novels in Shakespeare…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of narrative design in a game-based learning environment. Specifically, this investigation focuses the narrative design in an adventure-styled, game-based learning environment for fostering argumentation writing by looking at how the game narrative impacted player/learner (1) intrinsic…

The study of literature has many important benefits for students, but research shows that students often have difficulty interpreting literary texts, are unable to read critically, and are challenged to write interpretations that go beyond basic plot summary. This article provides a theoretical interpretation of the processes by which students…

This unit is one of a series that represents specific moments in history from which students focus on the meanings of landmark events. By studying primary sources of a crucial turning point in history, students become aware that choices had to be made by real human beings, that those decisions were the result of specific factors, and that they set…