Social workers engage in various types of writing in the educational setting and in diverse practice settings at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. What they write and how they write has a major impact on people's lives. This teaching note highlights the importance of individualized writing support through a project that used peer writing…

Supporting upper elementary students' higher level (i.e., analytic) thinking about texts in writing is a challenge for many teachers, in large part because what it means to analyze text is not well defined and because this skill is a relatively new expectation in elementary grades. In this article, the authors clarify the goal of three common…

Expository writing--the kind of writing that explains and informs--is essential for success in school and the workplace. Students who cannot write at a competent level struggle in college. With the advent of e-mail and the Internet, an increasing number of jobs require solid writing skills. No matter what path students choose in life, the ability…

Many elementary teachers teach students to write, but this writing tends to focus only on students writing about themselves or writing short stories. Because students do not spend enough time in the early grades reading nonfiction in science and history, they lack the knowledge--of both content and the nature of nonfiction writing--necessary to…

When it comes to academic work, students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have the required knowledge but struggle to get their thoughts down in writing. This is a practical guide to teaching and improving writing skills in students with ASD to meet academic writing standards and prepare for the increased expectations of higher education.…

This article looks at the use of extended metaphor in teaching. Our case studies as two teachers using metaphor in different settings show how metaphor is experienced by learners to different pedagogical effect. The article demonstrates that metaphor can be used not only for the similarity between vehicle and target systems, but also for the…

According to the authors, five years ago their school district embraced Understanding by Design as the organizing framework for curriculum. The emphasis on enduring understandings and essential questions led the sixth grade social studies teachers to reevaluate what they were teaching in their World History Curriculum. Together the authors worked…

In this article, the author investigates whether an alternative grading system (contract grading) would yield the same final grades as traditional grading (letter grading), and whether or not it would be accepted by students. The author states that this study demonstrated that contract grading was widely, and for the most part, enthusiastically…

This article summarizes a dissertation study designed to determine the effectiveness of instructional interventions that focus on proofreading and editing skills of first-year college students enrolled in business communication courses. The study used a pretest-posttest quasiexperimental control group design and collected data from 56 participants…

The purpose of this article is to provide teachers with strategies for improving students' writing and deepening their conceptual understanding through the use of science notebooks. The strategies include using various resources and providing a variety of feedback opportunities for students. A sample science investigation and an accompanying…

Improve students' writing skills and boost their assessment scores while adding arts education, creativity, and fun to your writing curriculum. With this vibrant resource, improving writing skills goes hand-in-hand with improving test scores. Students learn how to use acting and visualization as prewriting activities to help them connect writing…

This article presents a lesson cycle of activities for teaching reading and writing skills for expository text. The lesson cycle consists of four parts: (1) vocabulary words, (2) text structures, (3) modified sentence completion activity, and (4) rewriting text. Sixth- and seventh-grade summer school students were taught to recognize and…

The present paper underscores the importance of the cognitive orientation of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in their success in writing courses. A few suggestions are made as to how EFL teachers can put their students on the right cognitive path in their writings.

While formal, standardized assessment instruments provide valuable and necessary information about students' various abilities and skills, the use of informal and qualitative assessment approaches has the benefit of leading directly to instruction based squarely on an individual student's needs, strengths, and existing skills. This article…

To write well, it is only necessary to write simply and clearly. To learn how, one must want to write clearly, be willing to work hard, and follow some basic guidelines. Before writing, create an outline by arranging ideas on note cards and putting them in a logical sequence. Write to the reader's level of knowledge about the subject. Avoid…