There is a strong body of research showing associations between handwriting automaticity and children's writing performance. However, less is known about keyboarding automaticity and young students' writing performance. We investigated the relationship between handwriting and keyboarding automaticity and writing performance in both modalities in a…

To date, there is no clear evidence to support choosing handwriting over keyboarding or vice versa as the modality children should use when they first learn to write. 102 Norwegian first-grade children from classrooms that used both electronic touchscreen keyboard on a digital tablet and pencil-and-paper for writing instruction wrote narratives in…

In the era of technology and digital standardized testing, one might question the practicality of teaching cursive handwriting to early learners. The problem addressed in this study is that due to the increased use of technology in the Montessori classroom, teachers may not value cursive handwriting instruction as an important skill for early…

Writing development seems heavily dependent upon the automatization of transcription. This study aimed to further investigate the link between transcription and writing by examining the effects of promoting handwriting and spelling skills on a comprehensive set of writing measures (viz., bursts and pauses, levels of written language, and writing…

This study aimed to describe the writing activities that test takers engage in when responding to the writing tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"[superscript R] test and to examine the effects of task type and test-taker English language proficiency (ELP) and keyboarding skills on the frequency and distribution of these activities. Each of 22 test…

Students with learning disabilities in writing often experience challenges with many or all of the components of creating text. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2012), 95% of 8th- and 12th-grade students with disabilities failed to score within the proficient range in writing. This multiple-baseline-across-participants…

This study examined the composing processes of five postsecondary students who used or were learning to use speech recognition software (SR) for college-level writing. The study analyzed their composing processes through observation, interviews, and analysis of written products over a series of composing sessions. This investigation was prompted…

The four-week university-sponsored summer Computer-based Writing (CBW) Program directed by the head of a special education initial teacher licensure program gave teaching interns opportunities to work with young struggling writers in a supervised clinical setting to address keyboarding skills, writing conventions and knowledge and application of…

Classroom teachers sometimes struggle trying to find time during the typical school day to provide the writing instruction students need to be successful. This study examined 29 fifth through twelfth grade classroom teachers' survey responses about their perception of the effectiveness of using an online blogging tool, Kidblog, to plan and provide…

Composing text is an essential skill for students. Assignments, tests, and emailing are a few examples of the many tasks which require students to generate thoughts and put them into prose. For many students, choosing a topic, creating an outline, generating an initial draft, and making edits to produce a final copy is a fluid process which poses…

Writing is an essential skill for success in many academic and professional settings. Despite receiving individualized feedback on their writing, many students struggle with writing in postsecondary education. This dissertation addresses this gap by focusing on the writing process--the moment-by-moment actions taken during writing--rather than the…

This intervention study aimed to test the effect of writing process feedback. Sixty-five Grade 10 students received a personal report based on keystroke logging data, including information on several writing process aspects. Participants compared their writing process to exemplar processes of equally scoring (position-setting condition) or…

The present study evaluated the effects of web-based training on Spanish pre-service and in-service teacher knowledge and implicit beliefs on learning to write. A sample of pre-service teachers and in-service teachers from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, and Spain participated in the online course. Findings suggest that teachers may improve…

Elementary students are expected to engage in written expression that is handwritten and typed. One critical skill of written expression is sentence construction: the composition of multiple words that follow rules of semantics and syntax. Unfortunately, many students with disabilities struggle to successfully handwrite or type complete sentences.…

Numerous studies of written language development have shown minimal improvement over the course of an instructional period, yet these solely text-based studies offer little explanation for the lack of changes in writers' language because little is reported about the classroom and the participants. The purpose of this study is to use goal theory to…