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…

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…

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…

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 aim of this research was to explore Australian high-school students' argumentation and informal reasoning about biotechnology. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 10 Year-8 students (12-13 years old), 14 Year-10 students (14-15 years old) and 6 Year-12 students (16-17 years old) from six metropolitan high schools in Perth,…

This report describes the development of grade norms for timed-writing performance in two modes of writing: persuasive and descriptive. These norms are based on objective and automatically computed measures of writing quality in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, vocabulary, organization, and development. These measures are also used in the…

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…

Uses Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy of cohesive devices to examine the kinds of cohesive ties used in arguments and narratives at grades 6, 10, and 12. Investigates whether there are differences between both grade levels and modes. (AEW)

The taxonomy of cohesion devised by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasen was used to examine the kinds of cohesive ties used in argumentative prose written by 105 sixth, tenth, and twelfth grade students. In this way, the study sought to determine whether there were differences between grade levels in the kinds of ties used and in the numbers of…

The compositions of sixth, tenth, and twelfth grade students were used to determine whether narrations or arguments of high syntactic complexity were rated higher than narrations or arguments of low syntactic complexity. Selection of the compositions was made in pairs--one of high syntactic complexity and one of low syntactic complexity--each…

Compositions in the narrative and argumentative modes of discourse were collected from 240 students (40 boys and 40 girls each from grades 6, 10, and 12) and analyzed for mean T-unit length to determine any differences in syntactic complexity across modes of discourse or grade levels. At each grade level, T-unit length was significantly greater in…

Study investigated the effectiveness of four instructional strategies on secondary students' argumentative writing, noting how different essay qualities influenced holistic scoring. Researchers found no significant differences in instructional strategy effectiveness or use of holistic scoring. Students' prior knowledge affected their ability to…