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Struggling writers and students with disabilities tend to have difficulties with multiple aspects of the writing process. Therefore, in this chapter, we describe Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD; Harris, Graham, Mason, & Friedlander, 2008). SRSD is a writing intervention with extensive research demonstrating its effectiveness for improving the writing quality of struggling writers and students with disabilities when implemented by both teachers and researchers in a variety of educational settings. We also describe an ineffective writing practice, stand-alone grammar instruction. Although this type of grammar instruction is explicit, it is removed from an authentic writing context, and decades of research have demonstrated its negative effects on students’ writing quality. We close the chapter with recommendations for future research on SRSD as well as general suggestions for teachers who provide writing instruction to struggling writers and students with disabilities.

An exploratory study was undertaken to examine the implementation of strategy instruction in persuasive writing with a class of 10 adolescent students with severe emotional/behavioral disabilities (EBD). Several learner characteristics were observed to interact with curriculum and instructional variables. Modifications were made, on an ongoing basis, to respond to these student characteristics. After approximately four months of instruction, findings indicated that all students had mastered the components of effective persuasive essay writing, and performed competently on criterion writing measures, greatly different from performance at the beginning of instruction. Although the design of this investigation does not allow for definitive causal explanations, insights were gained regarding the interaction between EBD characteristics and strategy instruction. Implications for further research are discussed.

This paper aims to explore how collaborative research assignment design consultations between instruction librarians and new graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) have the potential to improve the design of research assignments for first-year writing courses.

The author conducted a small number of questionnaires and structured interviews with first-time GTAs who serve as first-year composition instructors to explore their conceptions about teaching researched writing. Thematic analysis of the results of these qualitative instruments led to the design of a new framework for working with incoming cohorts of GTAs at her institution prior to the start of each fall semester.

New GTAs often emphasize strict source type parameters in research assignment design and expect their students to engage in expert research behaviors. Emphasizing the assignment design expertise of instruction librarians during new GTA orientation may lead to more assignment design consultations with first-time college writing instructors. Collaborative assignment design consultations between librarians and GTAs can improve the alignment of research assignment parameters with their shared goals for students' research and writing skills and habits of mind, including seeing research and writing as iterative and inquiry-based processes.

While not every instruction librarian works with GTAs, working with instructors to collaboratively design research assignments that shift focus away from using specific search tools and locating particular types of sources opens possibilities for what librarians are able to achieve in one-shot instruction sessions, in terms of both lesson content and pedagogical strategies used.

The existing literature on first-year writing addressing faculty and librarian assignment design collaborations, and research assignments more generally, does not often explicitly examine the experiences of librarians who primarily work with GTAs. This paper adds to this literature by highlighting specific obstacles and unique opportunities in librarian–GTA teaching partnerships in first-year writing courses.

Young children write to learn the alphabetic code, take notes to help them remember, and provide meaningful text to others. These are cognitively and linguistically complex processes. Reciprocal relationships among the development of writing, the purposes of writing, and the learners of interest impact instructional approaches and student outcomes. Teachers can increase success when they provide explicit and systematic self-regulation and writing instruction, view children as collaborators in the process, provide scaffolding that gradually shifts the responsibility to the children, and adapt instruction to meet the abilities and interests of the children. Effective instructional practices for young children with disabilities or who are at risk, are presented, for example, scaffolded writing, the use of graphic organizers, and self-regulated strategy development.

Relatively limited attention has been paid to the academic needs of students with emotional and behavioral difficulties. Effective interventions are needed to support these students academically, behaviorally, and socially. The purpose of the concurrent studies reported here was to investigate the effectiveness of academic support in writing for fourth- and fifth-grade students (six boys, two girls) and second- and third-grade students (seven boys, one girl) with writing and behavioral difficulties. The Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) approach was implemented as a tier-2 intervention within a comprehensive, integrated three-tiered model of prevention including academic-, behavioral-, and social-skills components. Students learned an on-demand writing strategy for their state writing-competency test. Dependent measures included number of story writing elements, total number of words written, and writing quality. Fourth- and fifth-grade students who completed the intervention improved in total number of story elements. There were mixed results for the total number of words written and writing quality. Second- and third-grade students did not improve their total number of story elements, total words written, or writing quality. Students in both studies scored the intervention favorably, while there were mixed reactions from teachers. Findings, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed. Implications for the construct of evidence-based practice (EBP) are also explored, including concerns regarding frequent assessment of writing throughout intervention regardless of stage of instruction in the SRSD model.

This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language.

In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing instruction. SRSI was adapted from the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model (MacArthur et al., 2015). The SRSD model includes self-regulation writing strategies, text and genre knowledge and think-aloud modeling. Findings allowed for a comparison of TSI and SRSI, in which organization knowledge does not need to be taught using SRSD methods. Measures of writing outcomes, including writing quality and summarization of main ideas, were administered after a one-month intervention.

Results revealed that, compared with traditional instruction, the TSI and SRSI groups each exhibited better writing outcomes. Compared with the traditional instruction group, each technique had a unique impact: SRSI on writing quality, and TSI on main ideas included in written summaries. Linguistic and textual analyses of students’ writing revealed that the TSI and SRSI group learners both demonstrated high syntactic complexity, content organization and lexical variation in their compositions.

The present study provides empirical evidence that explicit teaching of SRSI writing strategies or TSI can be implemented effectively and elicit gains in elementary school L2 learners’ written output. A clear division does not exist between self-regulated writing strategies and text structure knowledge; the two techniques should be complementary, as suggested in the earlier SRSD model.

Classroom-based research has addressed the need to enhance self-regulated capacity in writing. However, writing has become more challenging for primary school learners. In addition, writing is a cognitively demanding process. The plethora of processes involved in writing may be one of the factors that caused difficulties in writing. Thus, writing proficiency relies on the development of text structure knowledge and the fostering of self-regulation capabilities.

This paper aims to examine two teachers’ beliefs and practices on teaching writing at an urban, high-performing middle school to determine: What discourses of writing are being taught in an urban, high-performing US public middle school? What factors prevent or enable particular discourses?

Drawing on case study methods, this study uses a single-case design with two seventh-grade teachers at a high-performing urban school as embedded units of analysis. Data collection took place over one semester. Data sources included observations and interviews with the two teachers, an interview with an administrator and multiple instructional artifacts, including unit and lesson plans. Observational data were analyzed using a priori code for writing discourses (Ivanic, 2004) and interview data were analyzed for factors affecting instruction using open, axial and selective coding.

Both teachers enacted extended multi-discourse writing instruction integrating skills, creativity, process, genre and social practices discourses supported by their beliefs and experience; colleagues; students’ relatively high test scores; and relative curricular freedom. However, there was minimal evidence of a sociopolitical discourse aligned with critical literacy practices. Limits to the sociopolitical discourse included a lack of a social justice orientation, an influx of low-performing students, a focus on raising test scores, data-focused professional development and district pacing guides. Racism is also considered as an underlying structural factor undermining the sociopolitical discourse.

Although generalizability is limited because of the small sample size and the unique context of this study, two major implications are the need to layer discourses in writing instruction while centering critical pedagogy and develop teacher beliefs and knowledge. To support these two implications, this study suggests developing university-school partnerships and professional development opportunities that create a community of practice around comprehensive writing instruction. Future research will involve continuing to work with the participants in this study and documenting the effects of providing theory and tools for integrating the sociopolitical discourse into middle school curricula and instruction.

This study contributes to the field of literacy education’s understanding of internal and external factors limiting the sociopolitical discourse in a high-performing, urban middle school in the USA, an understudied context.

Adolescent students with disabilities often struggle with completing writing tasks efficiently. Until recently, most research regarding writing efficiency or fluency has examined production skills such as handwriting with young writers or examined how to use measures of fluency to assess student performance. In this chapter, 10 studies that directly address the impact of instruction on adolescents' writing fluency will be reviewed. Findings indicated that when teacher modeling and structured practice was provided for writing within a time limit, students' writing improved in the number of ideas or text parts written and in holistic quality. When measured, improvement generalized to a standardized writing fluency test. Implications for future research are noted.

Many students in the United States struggle to achieve proficiency in writing. Writing is an important skill to develop, as it is a way for students to communicate what they know and integrate knowledge and critical thinking skills. A lack of writing proficiency can have a significant impact on academic performance in secondary school and on postsecondary outcomes. Improving writing instruction requires theoretically sound, scientifically validated teaching practices, including assessments and instructional methods. It also requires that teachers are well prepared to implement such practices, including using assessment data to tailor instructional methods to meet the needs of students who experience significant writing difficulties. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of advances in research and practice related to validated teaching practices designed to improve the writing outcomes of students with intensive needs, and to describe an innovative way to prepare and support teachers to implement such practices.

Writing, as a critical academic skill, is receiving national attention – joining the ranks of reading, mathematics, and science. The focus on increased writing performance standards for all students has implications for students with learning disabilities (LD), as these students are most likely to struggle with basic writing skills, and with expressing their ideas and demonstrating knowledge through written expression. Fortunately, research-based practices have been established for teaching students with LD across writing dimensions. In this chapter, instructional approaches for writing instruction, and current and future trends for addressing standards, are described.