Background: College- and career-ready standards cite the "special place of argument writing" in preparing students to be college students, professionals, and engaged citizens in an information-rich society (NGA, 2010). To support these critical skills, the National Writing Project (NWP) developed the College, Career, and Community…

Within a Response to Intervention (RtI) framework, Tier 1 instruction requires the selection of research-based core curricula. However, many educators and administrators are not aware of high-quality core writing curricula. The authors assembled a rubric to assist schools in evaluating core writing curricula for Grades 3-5. Rubric components…

Educators have long recognized that parental and community supports are important underpinnings for children's success in school. With respect to the teaching of writing, however, little research has been conducted to provide evidence of effective practices teachers use to involve parents and communities. As part of a national Canadian study of…

An instructional module was designed to enable learners to use a systematic approach to create a topic sentence. Using the instructional system design model, the designer of the module identified needs, established instructional goals, developed a program of study, applied the instruction, and evaluated the performance. The instructional module…

Demonstrates that two fifth-grade avid writers differentiated between flow experiences and non-flow experiences associated with writing, and describes flow experiences in terms similar to those reported in studies in adolescents and adults. Shows that flow experiences occurred when students controlled important aspects of writing, such as…

Describes the author's experience with Laura, the younger sister of one of her fifth-grade students from the previous year. Notes her preconceived notions concerning Laura's academic potential. Realizes that she was setting expectations for her students without providing the information her students needed to achieve them. Concludes that Laura had…

Describes one student's writing project and how it develops in a writing program. Notes that his story focuses on the Holocaust and was inspired by reading over 15 books on the topic. (SG)

Describes how students parallel the process of author Megan McDonald in conducting research and collecting information to provide ideas for the form and content of their writing. Notes that guiding students to record and organize information in a graphic format helps them to transfer those interesting details to new types of writing. (SG)

Describes a drama-based language arts unit taught to a fifth grade class. Provides empirical evidence that drama as a strategy of instruction embedded within a writing/language arts unit helps students improve their writing. Suggests continued research and development of drama as a strategy of instruction. (PM)

Explores the effectiveness of using television and video to motivate student writing. Describes how, following a series of motivational and brainstorming sessions using television, video, and popular literature, 23 fifth-grade students wrote and videotaped dramatizations of short "teaser" scripts in cooperative groups. Notes that these…

Investigates Piagetian measures of concrete operations in relation to specific school tasks. Shows that seriation ability of fifth graders was relevant to the organization of temporal and causal relationships but that development of theoretically relevant cognitive abilities is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high levels of…

Summarizes research for teaching writing to students with learning problems. Develops, from the literature review, a checklist of instructional features and uses of the checklist to examine two fifth-grade basal textbooks. Concludes by recommending modifications: add modeling to the instruction, make parts of the instruction more explicitly…

Writing samples from 21 fourth and fifth grade learning-disabled students illustrate three typical problems. The Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing program incorporates strategies for performing the writing process and for enhancing student awareness of the roles of audience and text structure in planning, organizing, writing, editing, and…

Discusses student responses to and interactions with a professional children's writer who visited a fifth grade writing workshop. Describes the emerging confidence as writers of the children and the classroom teacher as a result of the author's visits. (HTH)

Describes how a teacher finds value in popular culture and violent writing by closely examining the writing of a student who laces his stories with explosions and battles. Finds that once he began to see the similarities between the media his student experiences, the writing the student prefers, and his own favorite media and writing, the teacher…