This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to examine the differences for students across language status. In our study, we sought to find the average levels of text length, cohesion, connectives, syntactic complexity, and word-level complexity in this sample across Grades 7-12 by sex, by English learner status, and for essays scoring above and below the median holistic score. Mean levels of variables by grade suggest a developmental progression with respect to text length, with the text length increasing with grade level, but the other variables in the model were fairly stable. Sex did not seem to affect the model in meaningful ways beyond the increased fluency of women writers. We saw text length and word level differences between initially designated and redesignated bilingual students compared to their English-only peers. Finally, we see that the model works better with our higher scoring essays and is less effective explaining the lower scoring essays.

Collaborative writing is one of the twenty-first century writing competencies critical for college and career success. Technology-enhanced writing platforms, such as Google Docs, can serve as effective media for written collaboration. Although cloudbased tools such as Google Docs are increasingly used in secondary schools, little is known about how students collaboratively write in these environments, including how feedback sources and types of tasks affect collaborative writing patterns. This study examined the content of feedback and revision in 424 Google Docs written by 145 sixth grade students to understand the variations in feedback and revision patterns across key contextual factors: the source of feedback (i.e., teacher vs. peer) and assigned task type (i.e., argumentative, narrative, report). We conducted a qualitative content analysis of feedback and revision, followed by Chi-square and ANCOVA analyses. With regards to variations across feedback sources, we found that teacher feedback addressed more macro-level features (e.g., content, organization) whereas student feedback focused more on micro-level features (e.g., mechanics, conventions), and neither teacher nor peer feedback led to subsequent revisions. With regards to variations across task types, we found that among the three writing genres, the narrative genre had the greatest number of coauthors and feedback activities, and most of these activities consisted of affective feedback or direct edits. In contrast, in the report genre, the feedback activities tended to focus on content and organization, and the language functions of both feedback (e.g., advice, explanation) and revision (e.g., acknowledging, clarifying) were most evident in the report genre. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design and implementation of technology-based collaborative writing tasks in academic settings, as well as the limitations and directions for future studies.

Aim:  The use of validated measures of writing motivation is imperative to improving our understanding and development of interventions to improve student writing utilizing motivation as a mechanism.  One of the most important malleable factors involved in improving student writing is motivation, particularly for secondary school students.  This research note systematically examines the measures of writing motivation for students in grades 4–12 used by researchers over the last ten years and summarizes their psychometric and measurement properties to the extent provided in the underlying literature. This collection of measures and their properties and features is designed to make researchers more aware of the various options and to point out the need for additional measures. Problem Formation:  Writing is crucial to college and career readiness, but adolescents are inadequately prepared to be proficient writers.  Grades 4–12, once students have generally learned the basics of writing, are when students begin to develop more fluent and sophisticated writing abilities.  They turn from learning to write to writing to learn, and writing is increasingly done across content areas and in multiple genres.  Unfortunately, writing is a difficult skill to master, and students in middle and high school suffer from declining motivation.  The ability to measure changes in writing motivation at this developmental stage will allow researchers to more effectively design and assess writing interventions.  What are the current, validated measures of writing motivation available for researchers working with adolescents?  Motivation research has grown significantly in the last ten years, and a variety of motivation constructs (e.g., self-efficacy, expectancy-value) and related measures are used across the field. In addition to the variety of motivation constructs used in research today, researchers require domain- or context-specific measures of motivation (e.g., science motivation) to enable an accurate understanding of the role of motivation in achievement. Despite increased developments in both motivation and writing research over the past few decades, the intersection of these two fields remains relatively unexplored (Boscolo & Hidi, 2007; Troia, Harbaugh, Shankland, Wolbers, & Lawrence, 2013).Information Collection:  A thorough literature search was done to find measures of writing motivation used for this age group within the last 10 years.  Psychometric properties, to the extent available in the underlying articles, of each measure are described.Conclusions:  Ultimately, seven discrete measures of adolescent writing motivation were found, but only limited psychometric details were available for many of the measures.  No “gold standard” measure was found; indeed, the measures utilized varied motivational constructs and rarely reported more than the Cronbach’s alpha of the underlying instrument. Researchers need to carefully parse through the related motivation literature to understand the most likely constructs to be implicated in their intervention. They need to consider factors specifically related to their study, such as how stable the construct being targeted is developmentally, whether the term and type of intervention will be sufficient to make an impact on the students’ motivation as suggested by the underlying motivational literature, and what the target of the intervention is. Appropriate motivational constructs to be measured will vary depending on the intervention and its anticipated theory of change.Directions for Further Research: Several underlying motivation constructs have been used in the measures described in this review, particularly self-efficacy. However, a number of important motivation constructs, such as interest and self-determination theory, were not captured by the measures found.  This review of currently available measures will give researchers options when wanting to include validated measures of writing motivation in their studies and suggests that additional, validated measures are needed to adequately cover the relevant motivational constructs.

This study examines the effects of a one-to-one laptop program on the scientific writing of 5th and 6th grade students. A total of 538 native English-speaking, fluent English-proficient, and limited English-proficient students from four laptop schools and three control schools were prompted to write scientific essays at the start and end of the school year. Essays were examined along three dimensions: word use, text complexity, and writing quality. Overall, students who used laptops wrote longer, better structured essays that included more paragraphs and sentences. Students in the laptop condition also wrote higher quality prose that contained richer details and better addressed the prompts. Students in the laptop condition additionally showed greater gains from the beginning to the end of the year in the number of sentences per paragraph and the number of words per sentence than students in control classrooms. Finally, we found that although students’ writing varied as a function of proficiency in English, the effects of writing with laptops, in terms of both modality effects and gains associated with the treatment, were comparable for students with limited English proficiency, language minority students who were considered to have fluent English proficiency, and native English speakers. Thus, the benefits of including individual laptops in writing instruction may be enjoyed by elementary school students with varying levels of English proficiency.

The teaching and learning of writing was examined in ten diverse K-12 schools in which all of the students in one or more classrooms had individual access to laptop computers. Substantial positive changes were observed in each stage of the writing process, including better access to information sources for planning and pre-writing; easier drafting of papers, especially for students with physical or cognitive disabilities that made handwriting laborious; more access to feedback, both from teachers, who could read printed papers much more quickly than handwritten ones, and, in some schools, by automated writing evaluation programs; more frequent and extensive revision; and greater opportunities to publish final papers or otherwise disseminate them to real audiences.