This article outlines how home and school working together supported the writing of lower-achieving boys. It describes an activity in which parents and children selected artefacts at home to inspire writing in school. This model of home-school partnership permitted different levels of parental involvement and also allowed the child to take a key…

As two lecturers from quite different disciplines--Population Health and Musicology--we faced a common instructional challenge: how to improve the standard of student writing in our first-year courses for nonmajors, and thus to invite our students into the discourses of our disciplines. We collaborated in the design of a sequence of online writing…

Explicitly and systematically teaching strategies for planning and drafting specific types of text has improved the writing of elementary and middle school students with disabilities in previous studies. In this investigation, we examined the effect of teaching a planning and drafting strategy for persuasive writing to high school students with…

Learning outcomes for introductory college-level science classes include content knowledge and a range of critical thinking and analysis skills. In this context, rich writing assignments that engage students in researching content, constructing arguments, and critiquing other students' work are highly desirable but unwieldy due to large…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

This study investigated effects of background music on writing performance of nine 6th grade students with learning disabilities at one suburban public elementary school in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. A single-subject A-B-A design was utilized, and results from graded writing prompts with and without background music over 21…

This exploratory study aims to analyse the nature of teacher feedback during a collaborative writing assignment, and to identify the possible effects feedback has on the revision of a text written by university students in an asynchronous online learning environment. Under analysis are three editions of a master's course in e-learning, during…

Journalism students can no longer focus on being just writers or photographers or videographers. They must leave college with a multitude of media skills to have the greatest potential for career success. The development of the iPad and supporting apps has created a "one-stop shop" of journalistic tools that enable students to learn…

In this dissertation, I use qualitative research methods to study relationships between compositionists and faculty in other disciplines in the context of cross-curricular literacy (CCL) work. Drawing on a two-year CCL project in the biology department, for which I was a participant observer, I argue that compositionists need to attend more…

Most students come to their graduate programs with academic writing skills insufficient to excel in their studies. A lack of academic writing skills among graduate students has been a problem in a college of education at a large southeastern public research university where the project described in this article was implemented. To address this…

The discussion will describe how rubrics can help to provide effective assessment criteria for evaluating written assignments in college undergraduate classes. A student-centered theory focus will highlight how valuable teacher/student communication can help lead to improving student writing. Rubrics can be a practical way to improve feedback,…

A secondary English teacher in the Bronx, Marisa Harford describes several self-reflective activities she has designed to improve students' writing skills. Beginning a new school year with activities like Harford's can focus students' efforts all year. (Contains 1 figure.)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of reading a model written assignment, generating a list of criteria for the assignment, and self-assessing according to a rubric, as well as gender, time spent writing, prior rubric use, and previous achievement on elementary school students' scores for a written assignment (N = 116).…

In 2005, the undergraduate advisory committee at the University of Toronto Mississauga found that across all disciplines, writing proficiency was the skill weakness that generated the greatest concern. Students reported that they often found writing tasks intimidating, and suggested that effective feedback and guidance would improve their writing.…

Students in higher learning institutions need to write lots of reports based on the projects done. Since they are at the tertiary level of education, they are required to use English in their reports. This is to ensure that they are able to function well in English later at the workplace. Writing requires students to apply rules regarding sentence…