Many high schools in the United States are contending with modest student writing achievement and looking for ways to enhance teachers' writing instruction. This is especially the case for schools deemed to be "underperforming" and struggling to reform writing pedagogy against an accumulation of teacher and leadership turnover, limited…

The following study was developed to investigate the development of writing skills in second and third grade students. The recent emphasis on writing, specifically writing in multiple genres, made in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, 2010) has increased the need to further understand how students write. The NAEP (2002) reports that…

Despite the potential benefits that computer approaches could provide for children with cognitive disabilities, research and implementation of emerging approaches to learning supported by computing technology has not received adequate attention. We conducted a pilot study to assess the effectiveness of a computer-assisted learning tool, named…

A review of studies published from 2000 to 2012 was conducted to describe the literacy skills of underprepared postsecondary students, identify teaching approaches designed to bring their skills to the college level, and determine methods of embedding developmental instruction in college-level course work. The studies pinpointed numerous weak…

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) incorporates challenging literacy standards into middle grades and high school content areas within a variety of academic disciplines, not just English/language arts courses. The Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) provides schools with instructional tools needed to help teachers understand and implement…

This research study analyzes the literacy and foreign langauge processes of learners in the "Procesos Básicos" Program. The participants were 15 Spanish-speaking children and young adolescents, whose highest level of education was first grade. Eight of the 15 children were Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and the others were affected…

Adolescent literacy, or adolescents' ability to read, write, and communicate about the variety of texts they encounter in and out of school, has remained inordinately, and consistently, low for the past 20 years (NCES, 2010). Self-efficacy is a widely-used construct for measuring and predicting student achievement (Pajares, Johnson, & Usher,…

This paper reports on a small action research project carried out by a Special Education Needs Coordinator (SENCO) in a small rural, full primary school in New Zealand. It focused on improving the literacy outcomes for Years 5-8 boys in the school by way of a boys'-only writing group. Results show that the boys'-only learning group had a positive…

This paper draws on data from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project on literacies in the context of further education in the UK. Taking a social view of reading and writing moves us away from seeing literacy (singular) as a universal set of transferable skills towards seeing literacies (plural) as emergent practices found…

This article seeks answers to questions, such as how children's writing develops and how young students express themselves in writing at various stages of their development. This article reviews the literature through a wide lens as it examines elementary students' writing and is intended to lead to a more comprehensive understanding of…

A national literacy professional development project reduced the achievement gap for students experiencing difficulties in reading or writing in 91 of New Zealand's schools. It was based on two premises: coherence within and between the multiple levels of the schooling and educational administration systems, and a focus on evidence-informed…