As doctoral enrolments have soared in many countries around the world, considerable attention has been devoted to how an increasingly diverse candidature can succeed in thesis writing. Along with supervisory guidance during the student's research project, various publications have emerged to help students with thesis writing requirements. However,…

This article focuses on the 2019 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) assessment of student ability in writing. It begins with an overview of the study and its results, then turns to students' use of planning strategies to support their writing. Drawing on research on the association between planning and achievement in writing,…

This article offers an overview of a first-year writing course in Aotearoa New Zealand, Tu Kupu: Writing and Inquiry, which forms part of a core Bachelor of Arts (BA) curriculum with "citizenship" as a key theme. I situate the course in the context of the tertiary sector in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the social and political contexts for…

Understanding writing as a performative material practice, this paper highlights the "imperative" as a strategy to enhance writing practices in our classrooms and academic workshops. Drawing on posthuman theories and intra-active relationships, it describes how performative arts-based writing can provide a way to engage with the human…

Self-regulating strategy development (SRSD) writing instruction is an evidence-based approach that has been shown to increase students' writing performance and knowledge of writing. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether early elementary students' story writing performance and knowledge of writing would change following 5 weeks of…

We investigated writing performance and knowledge of writing before and after a persuasive writing intervention for ethnically diverse elementary school students in a low socio-economic community in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ). We used a one-group pre-post design. The participants (n = 24) were year 5 and 6 students (ages 9-11) from the same…

This paper reports on the results of a two-year study into threshold concepts (TCs) in doctoral writing. The findings informed the development of a thinking to write strategy (the 4x4) that has been implemented as part of a pan-university doctoral writing programme at a New Zealand university.

Traditionally, assessing student writing ability has often been product-focused. Advocates of child-centered process-oriented classrooms, however, suggest that teachers should also focus on understanding children's writing behaviors in the context of meaningful communicative tasks. In such an approach, writing conferences are one way in which…

This article examines the extent to which classroom instruction conveyed challenging learning goals in writing through a range of teaching activities and how well the participating students understood those goals. We report an empirical study that examined the quality of writing instructional goals, how well they were conveyed to students through…