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 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.