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The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which early adolescent programmers embed meaning in their digital media created within an online programming community called Scratch.

The author completed an 18-month descriptive case study with 5 early adolescent participants. The research design included a multimodal analytic analysis of participant artifacts and inductive analysis of semi-structured interviews and transcription frames.

Participants embedded meaning to achieve four primary purposes, namely, to guide visitors through exhibits, to story, to engage in conversation and to game. To achieve each goal, the participants embedded unique semantic cues within specific Scratch structures.

Questions for how researchers in literacy and learning can further explore meaning-making within programming-as-writing are suggested.

Connections to the supportive structures within Scratch are discussed in the context of programming-as-writing. Considerations regarding the use of Scratch to promote programming-as-writing are provided for educators.

The findings in this study provide an introductory step toward an enhanced understanding of the ways in which youth embed meaning into digital media as they engage in programming-as-writing. Although coding has been researched within the context of computer science, the use of coding in multimodal composition should be explored as it relates to literacy practices.

This paper aims to investigate the viability of blogging over the summer holidays as an intervention to ameliorate the Summer Learning Effect (SLE) in writing. The SLE is the impact on achievement of taking a break from school over summer, and has been documented to affect differentially those students who come from low socioeconomic status (SES) communities compared with their more affluent peers. However, previous studies within similar communities suggest that the effect is not inevitable, and is amenable to intervention.

The present study is set in a group of low SES schools where students already have individual learning blogs. The Summer Learning Journey was designed by the research team in consultation with students and teachers from the schools and trialled in January 2015. The design of the programme drew on previous research that suggested that students would be motivated by interest, rather than achievement, and that literacy activity over summer should be leisure-based.

Initial evidence suggests that students who participated made measurable improvements compared with their own progress over the previous summer and also compared with a matched control group of students, and that the observed difference continued over the 2016 school year.

The study provides initial evidence of quite substantial differences in achievement for those students who were active bloggers.

The study provides an alternative direction from current summer learning programmes and indicates the potential for designing digital opportunities for learning at times when the school is not in session.

Points out the similarities and differences between library instruction and writing instruction in the higher education curriculum. Notes that information literacy librarians can learn from the experiences of composition instructors regarding curricular revision and reform. Suggests that one of the keys to information literacy reaching its potential is to find common ground with programs like Writing across the Curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to describe, reflect on, and problematize the curricula and student support created by the Writing Program at DePaul University’s School for New Learning. This case study discusses the challenges and considerations that the authors have used to develop writing classes and support for non-traditional adult students.

This qualitative case study emerges from the practical experience and theoretical knowledge of the three authors. The experience includes development, implementation, and revision of curricula and support services to fit the changing needs of the non-traditional student population.

The growing majority of students demonstrate at least one non-traditional characteristic: delayed postsecondary education enrollment, lack of high school diploma, part-time enrollment, full-time employment, multiple dependents besides a spouse, etc. In the face of institutional indifference, these populations frequently fail to receive the support that meets their particular needs.

Using their own experience of creating a Writing Program that meets the needs of adult non-traditional students, the authors discuss practical strategies for and possible pitfalls of providing writing support that can be adapted for similarly underserved student populations.

The paper does present interesting approaches for educating adult students. It covers the unique challenges in this population, and the the approaches that are specifically tailored toward meeting their needs.

The purpose of this article is to explore barriers and motivators for new professionals who write and present for the professional literature.

Authors from the ALIA New Librarians' Symposium held in December 2006 in Sydney, Australia were surveyed about their experiences of writing and presenting early in their career. The author of this paper was the symposium's programme coordinator.

The majority of authors were working in Australia, and few were required to write or present as part of their work role. In the absence of this requirement, factors that motivate new professionals to write can be difficult to define. Barriers to writing include time, skills, and responsibilities outside work.

The paper discusses a publishing opportunity aimed at new professionals and other strategies to reduce barriers to writing and presenting.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on information literacy and library instruction providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2016.

The paper provides information about each source, describes the characteristics of current scholarship and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The purpose of this article is to describe the rationale, process and results of an integrated curricular intervention for information literacy instruction in a first-year writing program.

The information literacy coordinator collaborated with writing instructors and the Writing Program Administrator on the initial design of information literacy outcomes. The librarian and instructors created a modular curriculum with multiple lessons and activities aligned to each outcome. The curriculum was housed in the course management system for easy updating and distribution. Finally, instructors taught the embedded information literacy activities for two semesters and measured student improvement through a pre-/post-survey and a rubric-based assessment of students’ citation and documentation.

Students saw significant gains over the course of the semester in their ability to use Boolean operators, identify the purpose of sources and understand citation styles. As a related and valuable measure, writing program assessment results showed an improvement in students’ performance in citation and documentation in researched writing assignments after a one-year implementation of the intervention. Writing instructors reported an increased awareness of information literacy pedagogy and intentionality in their teaching. Finally, the librarian was able to leverage this collaboration to highlight the teaching roles of librarians beyond the one-shot.

Well-known temporal and logistical limits exist in regard to embedded, one-shot and multi-shot approaches to information literacy. The latter two are especially unsustainable when implemented at scale, such as within a first-year writing program that serves hundreds or thousands of students each semester. This study documents a faculty development approach in which writing instructors integrate information literacy (IL) into their own instruction. This offers a model that makes explicit IL processes and skills to writing instructors, results in high student performance and allows especially the small college librarian to manage his/her other strategic information literacy partnerships.

This paper aims to investigate doctoral students’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their doctor of education program, specifically related to dissertation writing preparation. The results offer a complex picture that has implications for the design of doctoral education programs that aim to help students prepare for culminating academic writing products such as dissertations.

Qualitative data, by means of an anonymous online survey with open-ended questions, were used to ascertain 115 doctoral students’ writing experiences in a doctoral program at one university in the USA.

The findings of this study suggest the importance of intrapersonal factors, specifically the ability to engage in self-directed learning; interpersonal factors, such as peer and faculty support; and institutional factors, namely, faculty’s writing-based pedagogical practices, in supporting doctoral students’ academic writing.

This study suggests in addition to selecting and nurturing students’ ability to engage in self-directed learning, there are a number of specific strategies and practices doctoral faculty can engage in and use to prepare students for successful dissertation writing.

This study provides the perspective of former and existing doctoral students to illuminate the needs they perceive as they engage in dissertation writing. The study provides practical strategies based on common themes in student responses.

Editing assistance software programs are computer-based tools that check and make suggestions for the grammar, spelling and style of a piece of writing. These tools are becoming more popular as recommendations for students who struggle with written expression, such as English language learners (ELLs). The purpose of the present study is to compare the performance of four different programs with embedded editing assistance tools in their ability to identify errors in the writing of ELLs.

Repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to determine whether there were differences in the number of errors (i.e. spelling, grammar, punctuation and errors that change the meaning of the text) identified by editing assistance programs (i.e. Grammarly, Ginger, Microsoft Word, Google Docs and human raters) for writing by ELLs.

The results of the present study indicate that the four programs did not differ in their identification of spelling errors. None of the editing assistance programs identified as many errors as the human raters; therefore, editing assistance cannot yet replace effective human editing for ELLs.

Limitations with the present study include manual verification of errors flagged by editing programs, multiple raters, a small sample size and a young sample of students.

The paper includes practical factors to consider when integrating editing assistance software into the classroom, including the development needs of students, the impact of students' first language and student training on the technology.

This paper provides school psychologists, teachers and other professionals working with students with specific, evidence-based recommendations for implementation of editing assistance AT.

Writing with a Personal Computerpersonal computers, in and out of business, is word processing, which the author feels might more accurately be thought of as wordworking. That is also the area in which personal computers can be the most helpful to a library or a professional user. It is likely that there are more programs available for wordworking than for any other personal computing task. The author discusses some of the problems occasional writers experience, how a personal computer can help overcome them, features that professional writers should look for in a word processor, and how word processing works. Four contemporary word processing systems are used as examples. This material is excerpted from Crawford's book Common Sense Personal Computing: A Handbook for Professionals (copyright 1986 by Walt Crawford), to be published by Pierian Press this year.