The case analysis, a prominent genre within business and information systems (IS) programs, is challenging for students because there are competing demands to perform both academic/learner and professional/mock-consultant roles. Drawing on design-based research data from four different IS courses at our institution, in this paper we aim to map a pedagogical to professional case analysis genre continuum. We examine the expectations for student roles in these four different courses, where and how the case analysis assignments in these courses fit into the continuum, and whether they facilitate an effective developmental trajectory as a whole. Our analysis shows that our institution's trajectory is mostly effective in moving students from pedagogical to professional roles, but could be enhanced with extra support for case analysis writing that falls in the middle of the continuum. We offer recommendations for how academic programs could leverage the value of the developmental trajectory to create a cohesive sequence across the four-year student experience.

All writing involves complex linguistic knowledge and thoughtful decision-making. But where do students acquire the linguistic tools needed to write effectively? Many students come from diverse backgrounds and may need additional support and/or instruction in language and grammar. In order to better understand this situation, we conducted a qualitative multiple-case study to examine the experiences of 12 students in a first-year university-level composition course to understand the extent of their diverse learning backgrounds and language needs and expectations. We synthesized information from surveys, interviews, and written texts into narratives about each student's attitudes toward language and writing and also examined the actual language in their texts. The findings reveal wide diversity in linguistic backgrounds and experiences and that students need and want attention to their language skills in first-year writing. Findings further suggest that instructors should consider the backgrounds and abilities of individual student writers and listen carefully to students' perceptions about their own writing and language needs in order to build students' writing self-efficacy levels.

Keystroke loggers facilitate researchers to collect fine-grained process data and offer support in analyzing these data. Keystroke logging has become popular in writing research, and study by study we are now paving the path to a better understanding of writing process data. However, few researchers have concentrated on how to bring keystroke logging to the classroom. Not because they are not convinced that writing development could benefit from a more process-oriented pedagogy, but because 'translating' complex and large data sets to an educational context is challenging. Therefore, we have developed a new function in Inputlog, specifically aiming to facilitate writing tutors in providing process feedback to their students. Based on an XML- logfile, the so-called 'report' function automatically generates a pdf-file addressing different perspectives of the writing process: pausing, revision, source use, and fluency. These perspectives are reported either quantitatively or visually. Brief introductory texts explain the information presented. Inputlog provides a default feedback report, but users can also customize the report. This paper describes the process report and demonstrates the use of it in an intervention. We also present some additional pedagogical scenarios to actively use this type of feedback in writing classes.

This article introduces a Special Issue that gathers a collection of effective tools to promote the teaching and learning of writing in school-aged and university students, across varied contexts. The authors present the theoretical rationale and technical specificities of writing tools aimed at enhancing writing processes (e.g., spelling, revising) and/or at providing writers with automated feedback to improve the implementation of those processes. The tools are described in detail, along with empirical data on their effectiveness in improving one or more aspects of writing. All articles conclude by indicating future directions for further developing and evaluating the tools. This Special Issue represents an important contribution to the field of technology-based writing instruction, in a moment in which online teaching and learning tools have shifted from being an instructional asset to a necessity. We hope that in the future the validation of each tool can be expanded by reaching out to different populations and cultural contexts.

Teaching the craft of written science communication is an arduous task that requires familiarity with disciplinary writing conventions. With the burgeoning of technological advancements, practitioners preparing novice research writers can begin to augment teaching and learning with activities in digital writing environments attuned to the conventions of scientific writing in the disciplines. The Research Writing Tutor (RWT) is one such technology. Grounded in an integrative theoretical framework, it was designed to help students acquire knowledge about the research article genre and develop research writing competence. One of its modules was designed to facilitate revision by providing different forms of automated feedback and scaffolding that are genre-based and discipline-specific. This study explores whether and how the features of the RWT may impact revision while using this module of the tool. Drawing from cognitive writing modeling, this study investigates the behaviors of a multidisciplinary group of 11 graduate-student writers by exploring how they interacted with the RWT's features and how this interaction may create conditions for enhanced revision processes and text modifications. Findings demonstrate promising potential for the use of this automated feedback tool in fostering writers' metacognitive processing during revision. This research adds to theory on cognitive writing models by acknowledging the evolving role of digital environments in writing practices and offering insights into future development of automated tools for genre-based writing instruction.

The interest in computer-assisted interventions to promote literacy has increased over the years. In this study, we developed the Portuguese version of the GraphoGame Fluent and tested its effects on reading, spelling, and phonological awareness. Second graders struggling to read were randomly assigned to two groups: GraphoGame Fluent group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted remedial reading intervention, or GraphoGame Math group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted numeracy intervention. An additional, non-playing group, composed by second graders without reading difficulties, was formed (business-as-usual group, n = 15). Results showed clear benefits of GraphoGame on spelling and phonological awareness. After the intervention and one month later, the GraphoGame Fluent group displayed spelling and phonological awareness skills similar to the business-as-usual group, and above the GraphoGame Math group. Overall, these findings indicate that Portuguese struggling readers benefit from computer-assisted interventions that combine letter-sound correspondences with more complex orthographic patterns.

It is widely assumed that by identifying spelling errors and suggesting replacement words, spellcheck allows writers to revise spelling errors even if they do not have the necessary spelling knowledge. However, there have been no studies evaluating the efficacy of modern spellcheck tools for students with spelling difficulties, such as dyslexia. In fact, the very limited and dated research into use of spellcheck by writers with dyslexia indicated that, even when using spellcheck to revise spelling errors, this group left many misspellings in their texts. The current study is the first to investigate whether a modern spellcheck program allows college students with dyslexia to produce texts that are as free from misspellings as texts by their peers, and whether this affects the quality of the text in other ways.College students with dyslexia (n=18) and a control group of peers (n=18) wrote two short essays using Microsoft Word, one with spellcheck active and one without spellcheck active. Spelling accuracy and overall quality of the texts were measured. Without spellcheck, students with dyslexia made more misspellings than the control group, however, with spellcheck active students from both groups left almost zero misspelled words in their texts. Text quality was not affected. Results demonstrate that spellcheck helps college students with dyslexia to overcome the limitations that poor spelling knowledge imposes. Importantly, results indicate that spellcheck does not lead to improvements in text beyond spelling accuracy, or lead to poorer quality texts, indicating that it is suitable for use in exam conditions.

C-SAW (Computer-Supported Argumentative Writer) is an online authoring software embodying design principles derived from theories on written argumentation, self-regulation and conceptual change as well as feedback from practitioners and users, in line with a design-based research approach. Designed to scaffold writing processes, C-SAW is intended as additional support in instructional designs using argumentative writing for learning. This article presents the results of a mixed-method study comparing undergraduate students writing with C-SAW or a text editor. Outcome measures included the number of arguments and the degree of their completion, knowledge of argument components, topic knowledge and changes in epistemic beliefs. Participants writing with C-SAW elaborated arguments to a greater degree, but there were otherwise no significant differences between conditions for other measured outcomes. Furthermore, results were influenced by informal reasoning skills that outweighed the effects of condition. These results are discussed with respect to the difficulties of studying the effects of digital tools on writing and learning in controlled first-use contexts and the importance of developing instructional designs with explicit learning outcomes that are aligned to the instructional principles embedded in digital tools.

Written communication is an important skill across academia, the workplace, and civic participation. Effective writing incorporates instantiations of particular text structures - rhetorical moves - that communicate intent to the reader. These rhetorical moves are important across a range of academic styles of writing, including essays and research abstracts, as well as in forms of writing in which one reflects on learning gained through experience. However, learning how to effectively instantiate and use these rhetorical moves is a challenge. Moreover, educators often struggle to provide feedback supporting this learning, particularly at scale. Where effective support is provided, the techniques can be hard to share beyond single implementation sites. We address these challenges through the open-source AcaWriter tool, which provides feedback on rhetorical moves, with a design that allows feedback customization for specific contexts. We introduce three example implementations in which we have customized the tool and evaluated it with regard to user perceptions, and its impact on student writing. We discuss the tool's general theoretical background and provide a detailed technical account. We conclude with four recommendations that emphasize the potential of collaborative approaches in building, sharing and evaluating writing tools in research and practice.

Writing an argumentation about a controversial issue from contradictory sources is a challenging task. It involves understanding, managing, and generating arguments and counterarguments from different sources to support a final position, conveyed in a formal structure. Despite its difficulty, argumentative writing is not often taught in higher education in Spain. Furthermore, online interventions regarding this type of task are scarce. For this reason, we designed and evaluated virtual training aimed at writing integrative and well-structured arguments in a distance learning university. Sixty-eight undergraduates participated in this pre-post with a control group design. The training included explicit instruction through video lectures and practice exercises with immediate feedback using open online resources (e.g., Moodle). The results show that after the instruction the participants' written products improved both in their structure, the number of arguments for the against-position, and the degree of integration of the two perspectives. However, those products that presented medium or maximum integration were still limited. These results illustrate how online instruction of argumentative writing can be implemented in higher education with positive results. However, students still need more support to expand their skills for generating integrative synthesis. Considering these results, we propose further improvements in the designed training.

There is increasing evidence that automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems support the teaching and learning of writing in meaningful ways. However, a dearth of research has explored ways that AWE may be integrated within different instructional contexts and examined the associated effects on students’ writing performance. This paper describes the AWE system MI Write and presents results of a mixed-methods study that investigated the integration and implementation of AWE with writing instruction at the middle-school level, examining AWE integration within both a traditional process approach to writing instruction and with strategy instruction based on the Self-Regulated Strategy Development model. Both instructional contexts were evaluated with respect to fostering growth in students’ first-draft writing quality across successive essays as well as students’ and teachers’ experiences and perceptions of teaching and learning with AWE. Multilevel model analyses indicated that during an eight-week intervention students in both instructional contexts exhibited growth in first-draft writing performance and at comparable rates. Qualitative analyses of interview data revealed that AWE’s influence on instruction was similar across contexts; specifically, the introduction of AWE resulted in both instructional contexts taking on characteristics consistent with a framework for deliberate practice.

This study examines the benefits of an expressive writing intervention in 5th graders on well-being – anxiety and depression symptoms – and on working memory capacity. A classical paradigm of expressive writing was used in school children during their classroom time: half of the participants had to write about stressful and negative events of their own lives, whereas the other half had to write about a normal school day. Children were asked to write four times in two weeks, resulting in four days of writing. Each group completed questionnaires yielding measures of depression, anxiety, and working memory 3 times: before the intervention, just after the writing sessions and two months after following the intervention. The narratives were analyzed using Emotaix-Tropes software. The results revealed that all the children showed a decrease in depression and anxiety symptoms. By contrast, only children in the expressive writing group showed working memory improvement. The potential benefits of emotional disclosure in school children are discussed. While there are several possible explanations for these findings, the results of this study indicate, first, that expressive writing seems to be both feasible and potentially valuable for school children, and second, that some cognitive changes occur in terms of cognitive functioning.

Expertise research spanning a variety of domains has established the central role that deliberate practice plays in developing expertise. This type of practice demands time, internal motivation, effort, feedback, and determination to surpass existing levels of performance. To leverage the rigors of deliberate practice, the two expert textbook writers who participated in this study deployed the writing processes of reviewing, writing it down, and incubating while developing textbooks for English language teaching (ELT). Data collected mainly via concurrent verbalization—whereby the participants expressed their thoughts aloud while engaged in textbook writing—and pre- and post-concurrent verbalization interviews revealed that the participants called upon these processes in purposeful ways as metacognitive strategies used to maximize writing effectiveness, with metacognition operationalized here as the participants’ knowledge and recognition of how they thought and worked. This study provides insight into how textbooks are written in practice and thus has implications for the research field of materials development; the findings also point to practical strategies that might be utilized by those who write language learning materials.

This paper provides an overview of how analyses of linguistic features in writing samples provide a greater understanding of predictions of both text quality and writer development and links between language features within texts. Specifically, this paper provides an overview of how language features found in text can predict human judgements of writing proficiency and changes in writing levels in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. The goal is to provide a better understanding of how language features in text produced by writers may influence writing quality and growth. The overview will focus on three main linguistic construct (lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and text cohesion) and their interactions with quality and growth in general. The paper will also problematize previous research in terms of context, individual differences, and reproducibility

Expertise research spanning a variety of domains has established the central role that deliberate practice plays in developing expertise. This type of practice demands time, internal motivation, effort, feedback, and determination to surpass existing levels of performance. To leverage the rigors of deliberate practice, the two expert textbook writers who participated in this study deployed the writing processes of reviewing, writing it down, and incubating while developing textbooks for English language teaching (ELT). Data collected mainly via concurrent verbalization—whereby the participants expressed their thoughts aloud while engaged in textbook writing—and pre- and post-concurrent verbalization interviews revealed that the participants called upon these processes in purposeful ways as metacognitive strategies used to maximize writing effectiveness, with metacognition operationalized here as the participants’ knowledge and recognition of how they thought and worked. This study provides insight into how textbooks are written in practice and thus has implications for the research field of materials development; the findings also point to practical strategies that might be utilized by those who write language learning materials.

This study examines the benefits of an expressive writing intervention in 5th graders on well-being – anxiety and depression symptoms – and on working memory capacity. A classical paradigm of expressive writing was used in school children during their classroom time: half of the participants had to write about stressful and negative events of their own lives, whereas the other half had to write about a normal school day. Children were asked to write four times in two weeks, resulting in four days of writing. Each group completed questionnaires yielding measures of depression, anxiety, and working memory 3 times: before the intervention, just after the writing sessions and two months after following the intervention. The narratives were analyzed using Emotaix-Tropes software. The results revealed that all the children showed a decrease in depression and anxiety symptoms. By contrast, only children in the expressive writing group showed working memory improvement. The potential benefits of emotional disclosure in school children are discussed. While there are several possible explanations for these findings, the results of this study indicate, first, that expressive writing seems to be both feasible and potentially valuable for school children, and second, that some cognitive changes occur in terms of cognitive functioning.

The present study investigated the effects of applying cumulative group dynamic assessment (G-DA) procedures (Poehner, 2009) to support EFL writing development in a university context in Iran. It focused on learner achievement, patterns of occurrence of mediation incidents, and learners’ and teachers’ perceptions towards G-DA. Quantitative data was collected from learners’ performance on writing tests and the frequency of occurrence of mediation incidents involving EFL writing components based on Jacobs, Zinkgraf, Wormouth, Hartfield, and Hughey’s (1981) scale. Findings revealed that G-DA was more effective than conventional explicit intervention for supporting EFL writing development. Also, it worked best for low ability learners as compared to mid and high ability ones. Besides, the number of mediation incidents declined from 27 in session one to 8 in the final session, confirming the efficacy of G-DA in promoting both EFL writing and learner self-regulation. Most teacher mediation involved language use, vocabulary, and organization and fewer incidents involved content and mechanics. Qualitative data analysis indicated that most learners and teachers held positive attitudes towards the efficacy of G-DA for supporting EFL writing development. However, a few participants asserted that the procedures were unsystematic, stressful, time consuming, and inappropriate for large classes.

This paper reports on an exploratory study that investigated the relationship between English as a foreign language (EFL) writers’ reported metacognitive strategy knowledge and their English writing performance in multimedia environments in a Chinese tertiary context. A self-report questionnaire was used to collect data on 126 participants’ metacognitive strategy knowledge and EFL writing scores. Mann-Whitney U Tests were conducted to explore differences between high (n = 65) and low (n = 61) EFL proficiency groups. Analysis of the data revealed that the participants’ metacognitive strategy knowledge was correlated significantly with their writing performance. The high EFL-proficiency group reported having statistically significantly more metacognitive knowledge about three clusters of metacognitive strategies (planning, monitoring, and evaluating) than their low EFL-proficiency counterpart. These important findings point to pedagogical implications that there is a need to integrate metacognitive strategies into teaching and researching EFL writing.

This paper extends our research into a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine, where Primary School children produce animated stories through writing computer code. We first discuss the theoretical basis of our engine design, drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, embodied cognition and perceived animacy. This design aims to help children draw on the appearances of characters, props and scenery to evoke linguistic constructs leading to the emergence of stories. The second part of this paper reports on an empirical study where we aim to answer two research questions. First can compositions so produced be seen as valid compositions? To answer this question we conducted a linguistic analysis of coded stories and those written in an English classroom, and also using teacher ratings of these stories. Results indicate that while there are no significant linguistic differences between coded and English stories, coded stories are impoverished and should be seen as a first-draft to be revised in the English classroom. The second question was to probe our observation that while coding, children spontaneously told stories. Here we draw upon theories of embodied cognition and of perceived animacy. Our analysis suggests that these theories, taken together, help to explain the spontaneous emergence of stories.

There is no shortage of research on learner preferences and teacher perceptions of the value of feedback in L2 writing. However, studies comparing opinions from both sides are rare. Moreover, little is known whether L2 proficiency impacts learner preferences for feedback. To bridge these gaps, this study surveyed 70 students and 16 teachers from an intensive English program in the U.S. on their preferences concerning six dimensions of L2 writing feedback: source, mode, tone, focus, scope, and explicitness. The findings suggest that (1) students overall regarded teachers as the most credible source of feedback and wanted teachers to mark all errors in their writing and correct them directly; (2) higher proficiency students showed more positive attitudes towards peer feedback and inclination towards written, comprehensive, and indirect correction; (3) students at the two ends of proficiency (high and low) favored feedback in a mixed tone; (4) while teachers and students were allies on the usefulness of oral feedback, feedback on both rhetorical and language issues, and feedback in a balanced tone, teachers were nonetheless neutral about the benefits of peer feedback and preferred focused, indirect feedback. Suggestions are offered for ESL writing instructors to adapt their feedback for its maximum effects.

While previous research on peer feedback in L2 writing has stressed the importance of training in giving useful comments on peer’s writing, very few studies have specifically explored metacognitive training in peer review interaction in terms of the perception and actual reviewing practices of L2 learners. This mixed-methods study employed a 12-week intervention course in L2 writing, in which eighteen Secondary One students, aged 12–13 years, received metacognitive training in peer review interaction. The training focused on metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulations. The results showed that, first, metacognitive training in peer review interaction helped change the perception of these young learners and increased their level of engagement and collaboration during the five peer review tasks. Second, metacognitive training appeared to encourage students to provide more content-related feedback than language-related feedback during dyadic interactions. Finally, it was found that the students were able to seriously consider their peer feedback when revising the peer-reviewed drafts, but written feedback had a much higher chance of being incorporated than did oral feedback. The pedagogical implications of these findings were discussed.

This study introduces GAMET, which was developed to help writing researchers examine the types and percentages of structural and mechanical errors in texts. GAMET is a desktop application that expands LanguageTool v3.2 through a user-friendly, graphic user interface that affords the automatic assessment of writing samples for structural and mechanical errors. GAMET is freely available, works on a variety of operating systems, affords document batch processing, and groups errors into a number of structural and mechanical error categories. This study also tests LanguageTool’s validity using hand-coded assessment for accuracy and meaningfulness on first language (L1) and second language (L2) writing corpora. The study also examines how well LanguageTool replicates human coding of structural and mechanical errors in an L1 corpus as well as assesses associations between GAMET and human ratings of essay quality. Results indicate that LanguageTool can be used to successful locate errors within text. However, while the accuracy of LanguageTool is high, the recall of errors is low, especially in terms of punctuation errors. Nevertheless, the errors coded by LanguageTool show significant correlations with human ratings of writing and grammar and mechanics errors. Overall, the results indicate that while LanguageTool fails to flag a number of errors, the errors flagged provide an accurate profile of the structural and mechanical errors made by writers.

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to examine the level of authorial voice strength among Iranian second language (L2) writers; and (b) to investigate the relationship between L2 learners’ authorial voice strength and the quality of their argumentative written task performances. Argumentative writing samples were elicited from 129 upper-intermediate L2 learners in writing courses. To quantify learners’ voice strength, these samples were scored by two raters using an analytic voice rubric. Raters also provided a holistic rating of the overall authorial voice strength in written argumentations. The quality of argumentations was measured using the TOEFL scoring rubric. While descriptive results indicated that learners demonstrated a low level of voice strength in their argumentations, results from Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) suggested positive associations between voice strength along with two of its dimensions and the quality of writings. Moreover, results from Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) pointed to the association of low and mid-level of writing quality and low voice strength, and the prevalence of high and mid voice strength in learners with high proficiency in writing. Finally, while an Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis revealed that the ‘presence’ dimension of authorial voice was the most difficult one for L2 learners, a Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analysis showed that the difficulty of the three voice dimensions did not differ significantly across genders. The findings were discussed regarding English L2 writing within the Iranian context.

We describe a dialogic approach to developing argumentive writing whose key components are deep engagement with the topic and extended discourse with peers that provides the activity with both an audience and a purpose. In a dialogic intervention extended over an entire school year, pairs of sixth graders engaged in electronic discourse with peers on a sequence of topics, as well as wrote individual final essays on each topic. In their essays, they showed achievements relative to a non-participating group in coordinating evidence with claims, in particular in drawing on evidence to weaken claims as well as to support them. They also showed some meta-level enhancement in understanding of the role of evidence in argument. A recall task ruled out the possibility that this enhancement was due to superior recall of the specific evidence available to them, rather than broader meta-level understanding. A case is made for fostering development in argumentive writing both dialogically and in the context of topics that students engage with deeply.

Comprehensive descriptions of early writing development are needed to adequately inform instruction and intervention and yet knowledge about how early writing develops is fragmented. This paper provides a critical review of longitudinal studies of early writing development with specific attention to the logics of inquiry used. Twenty-seven studies of children up to age 10, spanning 34 years from 5 countries, are included. Researchers’ theoretical framing, research questions, definitions of writing, study designs, time span, analytic procedures, measurement or classification of writing, key findings, and attention to context or instruction are examined. Findings show that definitions of writing vary considerably or, in some instances, are nonexistent. These definitions have implications for the research designs and measures used, and how data were classified. Many studies describe developmental trends in a global way but few describe how the development occurs or goes awry. Few studies examine cognition in conjunction with context. Similarly, few studies present strong theoretical orientations toward writing with coherent connections between problem formulation and design, measures, or classifications used. Recommendations for future research are provided.

In clinical nursing simulations, a group of students provide care for a robotic patient during a structured scenario. As care is transferred from one group to another, they participate in a patient handoff, with outgoing students passing key information onto incoming students. In healthcare, the nursing handoff is a critical and perilous communication moment that is mediated by a range of participants and texts. Drawing on observations and video recordings of 52 simulation handoffs in the United States, this article examines how two student-designed texts – a collaborative patient chart and individual notes – are leveraged during the handoff. I also consider how handoff talk and writing changes as student nursing knowledge increases over the course of a year. By focusing on textual mediation of the simulated nursing handoff, this article contributes to existing research on professional writing pedagogy and to nursing scholarship on the handoff. Ultimately, it argues that a textual mediation framework can help bridge classroom and professional contexts by evaluating student writing not for how successfully it meets a set of imposed criteria but for how effectively it supports classroom activities.

A common practice in writing centers is to record the events of a tutoring session after it has occurred. Commonly written by tutors, “session notes” can be a useful resource for the day-to-day support work in which tutors engage. Currently, however, little research exists on how session notes can be used to measure tutor development and change over time. Instead, research focuses predominantly how particular audiences interact with session notes, rather than the linguistic content therein. This study addresses the gap in research between the conceptual and practical uses of session notes. The researchers implemented semesterly training modules for tutors, and then conducted a longitudinal discourse analysis of 1,261 session notes that were collected over six semesters. Session notes were coded for 12 variables to include behavioral, semantic, and affective reflections on writing center work. From this analysis, we were able to conceptualize how, in completing these forms, tutors describe their tutoring practice and demonstrate their tutoring knowledge. Findings show that, for many aspects of note taking, a semester of experience has an effect on tutors, such that they start to conform on note taking practices; however, specific trainings can change the behavior of experienced tutors.

Synthesis writing is a common college requirement. It is a reading-to-write task that involves selecting, organizing, and connecting information from more than one source to construct a new text. College students struggle with synthesis writing because they fail to organize and connect ideas. The present study investigated the synthesis writing benefits of a strategy system called SOAR that helps students select, organize, associate, and regulate information. Experiment 1 investigated the efficacy of SOAR-provided instructional materials. College students studied four texts about creativity with or without SOAR supplements in preparation for writing a synthesis essay. SOAR-aided students produced more complete essays (selecting), better categorically organized essays (organizing), and essays containing more intertextual connections (connecting) than non-SOAR-aided students. Experiment 2 investigated the trainability of SOAR and the effect of student-generated SOAR materials on synthesis writing. College students first completed a baseline synthesis writing task. Next, they either received SOAR training or did not receive SOAR training, instead practicing their preferred strategies. Finally, they performed another synthesis writing task. SOAR-trained students produced more complete and better organized essays than non-SOAR-trained students. Underlying cognitive mechanisms, study limitations, future research directions, and practical implications were discussed.

Over the years, research on writing has increasingly emphasized the value of adopting a sociocultural perspective to understand how social context and social interaction relate to writing regulation. Using the theoretical lens of participatory appropriation, this study investigates the self-regulatory behavior of three successful Bachelor essay writers in literature, and how the interaction with their supervisors supported students’ development of writing regulation in disciplinary-relevant ways. Data was collected through in-depth qualitative interviews at three key moments in the term; Pintrich’s self-regulation framework was used as coding heuristic to trace participants’ self-regulation behavior over the term. Self-regulation data was cross-analyzed with data coded as participatory appropriation to identify the overlap between students’ self-regulation of writing and their social experiences, especially the dialogue with their supervisors. Our results show how the supervisors acted as agents of socialization, providing frames for adoption of disciplinary-relevant ways of thinking and doing, as well as indirectly sustaining the students’ motivation and re-conceptualization of the writing experience. Overall, this investigation responds to calls for inquiries of self-regulation against the backdrop of the social context in which it is embedded.

In this paper, we provide a mental-chronometry measurement (reaction time, RT) and a mathematical model to support the hypothesis that writing increases long-term memory (LTM) consolidation. Twenty-five subjects read short passages, wrote or spoke summaries of the texts, and performed a word-recognition episodic memory task. In the recognition task, participants responded faster in the written condition than in the spoken condition. We fit 15 drift-diffusion models to the accuracy and RT data to explore which components of the memory retrieval process reflect the learning effect of writing. Model selection methods showed that the nondecision parameter accounts for this effect, suggesting that initial stages of learning through writing are associated with fast episodic-memory retrieval. We suggest that the current approach could be used as a tool to compare different models of writing to learn. Furthermore, we show how combining mental chronometry, evidence-accumulation models of behavioral data, and dynamic causal models of functional magnetic resonance imaging could further the goal of understanding how writing affects learning. With a broader perspective, this approach provides a feasible experimental link between the field of writing to learn and the cognitive neurosciences.

This paper offers a description and analysis of a genre-informed intervention that supported elementary-grade ELs to write arguments in response to narrative text. Instruction engaged students with the target genre's purpose, structure, and some key language features. The analysis offers an examination of the classroom discourse and materials, as well as the students' written responses. The paper offers evidence that lessons often supported students to actively engage in classroom conversations that highlighted some of the natural constraints and choices consistent with the target genre. The student writing samples provide evidence that young students are capable of writing analytical responses to literature with support. Students were able to write in ways that served the purpose of the genre and are highly valued in ELA classrooms. In addition, the analysis found significant variety among the student products: they took varied evaluative stances in response to prompts, modified their interpretations of character attitudes using nuanced lexis, and provided differing, but relevant evidence in support of their claims. Many students were likewise able to provide elaborated analysis of evidence from literary texts in a variety of ways.

The current study examined the impact of adapting an evidence-based instructional approach to develop ninth-grade students’ argumentative writing and self-regulated strategy use. Following the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model, strategies to plan and write argumentative texts were implemented in two Portuguese classrooms. The model relies heavily on the use of mnemonic strategies to support instruction. Thus, incremental effects of using dual-coding mnemonics (i.e., visual and verbal mnemonics) were explored when implementing SRSD instruction. For the first group (n = 23), SRSD instruction included verbal and visual mnemonics; for the second group (n = 25), SRSD instruction included verbal mnemonics alone. Groups were compared with a control group (n= 25) receiving standard writing instruction.The following findings were significant: a) SRSD instruction increased writing quality, organising, and spontaneous planning; b) dual-coding mnemonics enhanced writing quality, development of ideas, organising, language clarity, and spontaneous planning; c) national exams completed 15 weeks after instruction reinforced the effectiveness of the adapted SRSD strategies. The process of culturally adapting and implementing SRSD instruction to teach argumentative writing will be discussed, including the potential incremental effects of adding visual mnemonics to the SRSD instructional routine.

This study aims to explore effective ways in which students can learn to write synthesis texts. First, through a systematic literature search we found 16 (quasi-)experimental studies from 6th grade to undergraduate level in the field of learning to write source-based synthesis texts, that met our inclusion criteria. Second, we formulated a general instructional design principle, that included three main processes: (a) selecting relevant/important information from sources, (b) organizing, and (c) connecting that information. Bottom-up analyses of the six most effective studies yielded a set of learning activities that contribute to the improvement of students’ performance on writing synthesis texts. Subsequently, we supplemented our general design principle with relevant learning activities obtained from these effective interventions. One effective intervention differed considerably from the others due to its divergent nature, but its content was considered valuable enough to warrant the inclusion of an additional design principle. The design principles formulated in this study can be used as guidelines for future interventions in synthesis writing or as a means of support for teachers who want to develop educational materials for teaching synthesis writing.

We investigated how well readers’ perceptions of the lexical richness of short texts can be predicted on the basis of automatically computable indices of the texts’ lexical properties. 3,060 French, German and Portuguese texts (between 9 and 284 words long) written by 8- to 10-year-olds were rated for their lexical richness by between 3 and 18 uninstructed raters, and over 150 indices were derived from these texts. We found that the ratings could to a substantial degree be predicted on the basis of these indices and that the accuracy with which the ratings of shorter texts could be predicted was comparable to that of longer texts. For French and German, the greatest predictive power was attained by opaque models with scores of predictors, but models with fewer predictors based on a 6-dimensional framework of lexical richness perception or even with a single, easily computed predictor, Guiraud’s index, fared only slightly worse.

To date, research into functional descriptions of unfolding language has been almost entirely focused on speech. And whilst writing research has examined the revision of language units, it has backgrounded how these revisions contribute to the unfolding of a text’s meanings. Therefore, using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an underlying framework, and keystroke logging software (Inputlog) as a data collection tool, this paper takes a first step toward a dynamic description of written text in terms of the language structures, functions, and systemic choices found in the written revisions of two 2nd year UK undergraduates. More specifically, in detailed textual analysis of four unfolding, digitally composed text, whose end products totalled approximately 1700 words, this paper focuses on the revisions made during consecutive writing sessions, which lasted anything from 8mins to 8hrs 37mins and totalled 56hrs 18mins of recordings. The findings suggest that certain language choices may play a key role when it comes to shaping academic essays, and it is proposed that this new model of analysis can provide an additional perspective on writing behaviour in terms of how meaning-making practices unfold in real time.

There is abundant research evidence on the effectiveness of explicit writing instruction and peer-assisted writing. However, most of the research articles investigating these evidence-based writing practices fail to include clear and detailed descriptions of the interventions. Consequently, researchers and educational practitioners have no perception of the crucial ingredients underlying these interventions, hindering replication, dissemination, and implementation of evidence-based writing practices. In the present study, we provide in-depth insight into two instructional writing programs via an analytic description of both programs. More particularly, EI+PA students received explicit writing instruction and practiced their writing collaboratively, while EI+IND students received the same explicit writing instruction; however, they practiced by writing individually. Both interventions were analytically described by means of a reporting system. Following this procedure, the writing lesson programs were more particularly described by defining design principles, instructional teaching activities, and student learning activities.

This paper gives an analytic description of why and how an instructional writing program on the improvement of cross-genre writing skills in German secondary grade level has been designed and implemented. From a diagnostic research phase, and according to theoretical expectations, coherence management and perspective taking proved to be ability components that substantially contribute to text quality across different genres. To train these two abilities in a didactical setting, two 11-unit writing courses were analogously constructed and administered in 5th and 9th grades. There were 12 intervention classes and 12 control classes in each grade, forming 48 classes with 1.145 participants. The decisions that lead to the design of the intervention study and the corresponding didactical settings are explained and justified in detail, and the developed self-learning materials are described in terms of their assumed learning potentials and the underlying didactical principles. Based on the obtained empirical experiences, the intervention is critically evaluated with respect to good intervention research and its proper description.

Graduate students often encounter obstacles related to written science communication that can set them back in their path towards degree completion. Efforts to support these students should be informed by what they actually need or desire; yet oftentimes, programs are developed based on assumptions or intuitions. In other cases, proven models from literature are used to develop programs; however, due to a lack of justification for approaches and vague descriptions of daily teaching and learning activities, the intricacies of design are relatively unknown. Thus, in institutes looking to establish research writing resources or build on existing infrastructure, more research is needed to demonstrate how needs assessment can directly transfer to program development. In this paper, I describe how findings from a campus-wide needs assessment of graduate students (N = 310) and faculty (N = 111) informed the development of design principles for a week-long dissertation writing workshop. The complete description of the intervention, including how main elements and content align with socio-cognitive perspectives to writing, can facilitate replication; theory building; and communication about effective writing instruction. This work also offers a springboard for future research and program development and establishes a blueprint.

This article is an introduction to the special issue on how to report writing interventions in research publications. The six contributions included in this special issue systematically describe a broad range of writing interventions aimed at learning to write in primary, secondary, and higher education. Based on these contributions and on earlier recommendations of scholars in the field of writing intervention research, we established a set of recommendations for reporting key elements of writing interventions. These elements include characteristics of the context of the intervention, theories and/or empirical studies of writing, learning to write, and teaching writing, and design principles of the intervention at both a macro and micro level. These recommendations can be considered as a checklist for authors, reviewers, and editors when reporting or reviewing intervention studies.

To enable a proper evaluation of the results of writing interventions for scientific replication and theory building, it is of vital importance that the design principles underlying an intervention and operationalization thereof are clearly described. A detailed description of a writing intervention is also important from a practical point of view, to foster dissemination and successful implementation of the intervention into practice. In this paper we propose a framework for reporting on the design principles of multifaceted intervention programs in a systematic manner. Unique features of this framework are that we (1) separate the design principles for the focus and mode of instruction, (2) systematically describe how these principles are integrated and operationalized into learning and teaching activities, (3) systematically describe the professional development teachers need to be able to execute the teaching activities. We demonstrate how this framework can be applied, with a worked example of an intervention that we designed, implemented and tested in elementary schools in the Netherlands. The framework provided in this paper makes core features of writing interventions transparent to reviewers, other scholars, and educational practitioners, and warrants that an intervention includes all necessary elements in the most optimal way. Moreover, this type of framework facilitates the comparison of interventions across contexts and countries.

In this study we present a comparative report of two effective instructional programs focused on the improvement of upper-primary students’ writing competence through the promotion of revision skills. Both programs shared the main aim but had two different approaches. We contrasted writer-focused instruction with reader-focused instruction. To provide a valid report on the similarities and differences of the two programs, we applied two complementary dimensions. The first dimension, what the researcher intends students to achieve, provides insight into the types of students’ intermediate learning objectives and how they are sequenced. The second dimension, how to teach, includes the instructional design principles which relate the intermediate learning objectives to the specific learning and instructional activities in certain conditions. We analyse similarities and differences between the instructional programs and discuss the implications of using this kind of reporting system as a useful tool for reporting – and designing – writing interventions.

This article presents the design principles underlying the instruction provided in a Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) study that resulted in substantial improvements in the opinion writing of second and third grade students. The analysis focused on the SRSD instruction students received in the classroom as well as the practice-based professional development (PBPD) teachers received on how to implement SRSD for opinion writing. A newly developed model of writing that draws on both social/contextual and cognitive conceptualizations was used to identify the theoretical aims, instructional focuses, and corresponding instructional activities for (1) creating a PBPD community where teachers learned to apply SRSD for opinion writing, (2) reshaping teachers’ classrooms so that these writing communities were conducive to SRSD instruction, (3) strengthening the capabilities and motivations of teachers to provide SRSD instruction for opinion writing, and (4) improving the capabilities and motivations of students to compose more convincing opinion essays. This analysis is the most comprehensive examination of SRSD instruction presently available, providing greater clarity for researchers and practitioners on how this instructional approach operates and achieves its aims. Our analyses also demonstrated that there is a high degree of interconnectivity among the instructional activities underlying SRSD, as many of them are designed to meet multiple aims, cutting across professional development, classroom instruction, and student and teacher development.

This preliminary study examines the rating behavior of five composition and five ESL writing teachers while evaluating a text from a university-level non-native (L2) English speaking student. Using an eye tracker, we measured raters’ dwell times and reading behaviors across four areas of interest—rhetoric, organization, vocabulary, and grammar. Results indicate that raters with differing disciplinary backgrounds read the text differently. L2 writing teachers tended to spend more time on and re-read the rhetorical, lexical, and grammatical features of the text while skipping over more of the grammar errors, while composition teachers read the text more deliberately. The findings suggest L2 writing teachers were more prone to skim and scan for information on which to base a grade while composition teachers delayed rating decisions until after reviewing the entire text, which is corroborated in previous research. These findings can expand our understanding of how disciplinary background can influence rating processes, which can inform rater training procedures, especially in disciplinary writing contexts where L2 writing is judged by individuals with and without expertise in composition or second language writing. Moreover, it demonstrates the utility of eye-tracking methods to examine the cognitive processes associated with reading and scoring student writing.

To what extent does numbering the reasons for a negative decision influence the persuasive force of the text? That is the focus of this study, in which we report an experiment (with 265 participants) wherein the direct effects and the indirect effects of numeral markings are analyzed in two linguistic contexts: in the introduction of the upcoming enumeration of reasons (the so-called ‘trigger’) and in the lead-ins of the successive reasons of the enumeration itself. The experiment was conducted within the framework of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1984) and the Schematic Text Structural Expectations Hypothesis (Sanders and Noordman, 2000; Mulder, 2008). Adding numeral markers in both trigger and lead-ins turns out to enhance the persuasiveness of the text in several ways. It stimulates readers to elaborate more on the content of the reasons. It helps readers to scrutinize the reasons and stimulates recall, which contributes to a more balanced judgment. The markings also have a direct positive effect on persuasiveness, which points to an effect on low elaborating readers. Furthermore, inconsistent implementation of numeral markings (the combination of a numeral trigger with non-numeral lead-ins or a non-numeral trigger with numeral lead-ins) has a negative indirect effect on persuasiveness via text evaluation. This effect is explained by assuming that the Schematic Text Structural Expectations Hypothesis not only applies to text processing, but to text evaluation as well.

After an overview of several directions of research on cognitive and social processes in writing, this article presents a model of “co-regulation” of writing activities in the classroom. Co-regulation is defined in a situated perspective as the joint influence on student writing of sources of contextual regulation (structure of the teaching/learning situation, teacher interventions and interactions with students, peer interactions, tools and artifacts) and of processes of self-regulation. This conception is illustrated by the results of research on a writing activity in 5th and 6th grade classrooms. The research concerns two aspects of the co-regulation of students’ writing: (1) the role of whole-class discussions in the emergence of taken-as-shared meaning regarding the writing task and the influence of these discussions on the revisions subsequently carried out by students; (2) the articulations between self-regulation (reflected in revisions students carry out individually on their own drafts) and regulations resulting from peer interaction (reflected in revisions made during dyadic interaction). The conclusions drawn from this research are discussed with respect to their implications for writing instruction.

The purpose of the present study was to examine students’ metaknowledge of Procedural Knowledge (effective writing procedures) and Declarative Knowledge (knowledge of the characteristics of effective writing) with community college students through two open-response questions. Additionally, we examined common patterns of writing metaknowledge among responses to determine how these impacted their writing, utilizing the results from Coh-Metrix analyses of their writing samples. A total of 249 students from a large community college in Southwestern United States participated in the study.Analysis of their results showed participants reported commonly acknowledged ideas regarding metaknoweldge of effective writing in terms of Procedural and Declarative knowledge. Students focused on goal setting/planning, establishing purpose, writing, and revising when discussing Procedural Knowledge of writing and clarity, audience, grammar, and spelling when discussing Declarative Knowledge. A Latent Class Analysis (LCA) of a smaller group, consisting of 146 L1 English students, showed that students’ responses regarding Procedural and Declarative Knowledge did not significantly affect written performance, leading us to question students’ consistent application or understanding of writing metaknowledge. Instructional implications include encouraging students to examine their metaknowledge of writing and how it directly relates to the written product, to identify misuse or misconceptions and focus instruction.