Nearly all first-year composition learning objectives state that writing instructors will help each student to improve their knowledge of written conventions, like punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Historically, it has been difficult to achieve significant learning gains in writing mechanics. This teaching failure disproportionately damages the…

Reading is an active process where readers sometimes have difficulty understanding what they read. Ultimately, readers are required to combine the meaning of each sentence in a text in order to achieve text-level comprehension. Otherwise, the reader is going to have great difficulty with text-level comprehension. Factors such as sentence length…

Recent research in the area of Curriculum-Based Measures (CBM) in writing has shown that traditionally used metrics, such as total words written and total words correct, may not be the best tools for measuring writing performance, for both secondary and elementary aged children (e.g., Gansle, Noell, VanDerHeyden, Naquin, & Slider, 2002; Tindal…