The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of explicit, direct, and generative strategy training and working memory capacity (WMC) on mathematical word problem-solving accuracy in elementary schoolchildren. In this study, children in third grade ("N" = 82) identified as at risk for math difficulties (MD) were randomly…

The dangers of a single story in current U.S. large-scale writing assessment are that assessment practice does not align with theory and this practice has negative effects on instruction and students. In this article, I analyze the connections or lack of connections among writing theory, writing assessment, and writing instruction, critique the…

This longitudinal study examines the biliteracy results of Spanish-English emerging bilingual students who participated in a K-5 paired literacy model in a large school district in Oregon. Spanish and English reading and writing data show longitudinal gains in students' biliterate development, demonstrating the potential of the model in…

Purpose: This study examined dimensions of written composition by using multiple evaluative approaches such as an adapted 6 + 1 trait scoring, syntactic complexity measures, and productivity measures. It further examined unique relations of oral language and literacy skills to the identified dimensions of written composition. Method: A large…

This article reports comprehensive findings from a national study of the teaching and assessment of writing in classrooms across ten Canadian provinces and two of three territories. Through interviews with 216 grade 4-8 teachers and observations and interviews in 22 classrooms (1 to 3 classrooms in each province), we gathered information about…

Effective academic writing is accessible to readers because writers follow shared conventions for organization and signal their stance on particular topics; however, few specifics are known about how middle graders might develop knowledge of and use these academic language forms and functions to signal their organization and stance in persuasive…

Drawing on the appraisal framework from systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this article examines patterns of stance in a corpus of 92 high- and low-graded argumentative papers written in the context of an upper-level course in economics. It interprets differential patterns of stance in students' texts in light of interview commentaries…

This paper centres on the tensions between the introduction of plagiarism detection software (Turnitin) for student and tutor use at undergraduate level and the aim to promote a developmental approach to writing for assessment at a UK university. Aims to promote developmental models for writing often aim to counteract the effects of the structural…

Writing assessments have attended to the mechanics of writing, reflecting a value on the teaching of writing conventions. One quality of writing rarely assessed is authorial voice, a personal style that communicates the author's stance toward events reported and the author's relationship to the audience. The authors explore associations…

Dynamic assessment is a procedure in which development is simultaneously assessed and improved with regard to the individual's or group's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; Lantolf & Poehner, 2004). This study aimed to follow dynamic assessment and investigate the impact of three types of implicit and explicit feedback on the essay…

This study investigates the relationship in L2 writing between raters' judgments of communicative adequacy and linguistic complexity by means of six-point Likert scales, and general measures of linguistic performance. The participants were 39 learners of Italian and 32 of Dutch, who wrote two short argumentative essays. The same writing tasks…

Literacy educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of increasing students' writing proficiency across age and grade levels. With the release of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a new and greater emphasis is being placed on writing in the K-12 curriculum. Educators, as well as the authors of the CCSS, agree that…

In this response to Burdick et al. (2013), the author describes two possible and perhaps even common reactions to the article by Burdick et al. (2013). Advocates such as Way, Davis, and Strain- Seymour (2008) will likely applaud the development of the Writing Ability Developmental Scale and the possible widespread use of computer-based writing…

This study explored patterns in L2 writing development by focusing on one of the linguistic features of texts (fluency) from a complex dynamic systems perspective. It investigated whether two English-as-a-foreign-language university students would experience discontinuous change (phase transition) in their writing fluency through repetition of a…

This study examines the opportunities that a collaborative writing task completed in pairs and in small groups offers for attention to form. Previous research suggests that collaborative writing activities encourage learners to focus their attention on language and to collaborate in the resolution of their language-related problems in ways that…