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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.

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.

This paper examines the role of some basic variables that may be critical in children with difficulties in expressive writing. Preliminary data demonstrating the role of a series of variables are presented. In particular, based on these data, a model was derived using structural equations showing how orthography, neuropsychological functions (idea generation and planning), and revision affect the performance of tasks requiring children to describe the content of pictures. These variables appeared to significantly discriminate between children with good and poor expressive writing skills.

Many students with learning disabilities (LD) experience significant difficulties in developing writing proficiency. Early identification and intervention can prevent long-term writing problems. Early identification and intervention require reliable and valid writing assessments that can be used to identify students at risk and monitor their progress in response to intervention. One promising approach to assessing students' performance and progress in writing is Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM). In this chapter, we provide an overview of CBM. Next, we describe a theoretical framework for writing development, and discuss implications of this framework for developing writing assessments. We then describe current efforts to develop a seamless and flexible approach to monitoring student progress in writing in the early elementary grades, and highlight important directions for future research. We end with a discussion of how teachers might eventually use CBM to make data-based decisions to provide effective individualized interventions for students who experience writing difficulties.

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 asserts that while educational resources are times effective in teaching students how to write, the format in which they are delivered can influence results. With this in mind, this study aims to examine the effectiveness of using educational resources in a blended format.

This study used a mixed-method research design to elicit information from 70 participants recruited for this study. The researcher divided the participants into experimental and control groups where the researcher taught the control group writing skills in a hybrid learning environment without using educational resources while the experimental group used blended interactive educational resources. The researcher analyzed and interpreted the participants’ post-test scores and transcripts of the interviewees.

This study finds that blended interactive educational resources contribute significantly toward improving the students' writing skills; however, improvements were not found in all aspects of their writing.

This study unpacks the positive contributions of blended interactive educational resources in writing instruction. This study contributes to educational literature in showing that these resources may be effective in improving some aspects of writing text. This study adds to other corpora of studies that emphasize the importance of using educational resources for learning.

This paper provides an analysis of the experiences of undergraduate business students undertaking reflective writing as a series of incremental assessments. Using Moon’s map of learning (1999) as an analytical framework, it explores the value of reflective writing to students studying Asian culture in the business context during the first semester of 2017.

With 200 enrolments, the authors taught a core business course, Asian culture in the business context, in the first semester in 2017. The value of the assessments is analysed based on two data sources: written course feedback via a course survey and a combination of semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The written course feedback was collected by the university during the semester. Approximately, one-third of the students (n = 63) participated in the survey. The other data were collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups for nine students. Ethical approval for the collection of data was obtained from the university ethics committee.

The study confirms that reflective writing enables students to make meaning of their learning and transfer it to the cultural context of business practice. In addition, the assessments help the students develop logical thinking and academic writing skills. To increase the use of reflective assignments in business programmes, further research and teaching practice is required.

A limitation of this research was the relatively small sample size. Even though written survey feedback (n = 63) was used to complement the number of interviewees (n = 9), the findings of the data analysis may not represent the experiences of all students in the course. However, the data are valuable to bridge a gap between the existing research and teaching practice on the use of reflective writing in other disciplines and business education.

Although the transfer of academic knowledge to business practice is a core capability of the business programmes, business students may not obtain this during their study in the programme. Several students mentioned a lack of opportunity to apply reflective writing skills to other courses in their business degree, except one core course using a reflective essay as an assessment. This implies that the majority of the students in the degree are not exposed to situations that require them to critically evaluate, consolidate and consider what has been taught in relation to future practice.

Further research and practice will increase the popularity of reflective writing assessments in business programmes. As Hedberg suggests, reflective practice should be integrated into all classrooms in business education. Together with analysis and action, reflection should be a core capability for managers (Hedberg 2009). In addition, the business faculty needs to work in a reflective manner that encourages students to be familiar with the reflective practice.

This paper analyses the pedagogical aspects of reflection based on the experience of undergraduate business students undertaking reflective writing assessments.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how dominant social practices embedded in situated report‐writing activities in an automotive discourse community in South Africa causally shape component engineers' perceptions of literacy. The study explores how the dominant practices of supervisor feedback and report acceptance causally impact on effective report‐writing perceptions during report text production.

Critical ethnography is the preferred methodology as it explores cultural orientations of local practice contexts and incorporates multiple understandings to provide a holistic understanding of the complexity of writing practices. This study focuses on data collected during two interviews and a focus group discussion with four L2 component engineers as well as the questionnaires their two L1 supervisors completed.

The engineers tended to measure or associate literacy and effective writing standards with supervisor feedback practices. These feedback practices interacted causally with the meanings or associations, the participants gave to or associated with literacy and their report‐writing competency. As a consequence, literacy was often described in terms of correct wording or terminology, grammatical correctness, spelling, sentence structures or styles in reports as determined by their supervisors during feedback practices, rather than report content, structure or technical details.

The participants constructed literacy in terms of correct language, word and spelling use and focused on linguistic errors in their report writing. They tended to perceive rhetoric and engineering discourse as separate entities rather than rhetorically constructed contextual knowledge. Language problems were usually attributed to human being inefficiencies and L1 standards rather than the individual creation of knowledge.

This paper not only impacts causally on engineering workplace writing practices but on higher education and future report‐writing practices. Digital technologies and systems will increasingly impact on report‐writing practices, what constitutes contextual knowledge and acceptable literacies as varied and different audiences define acceptable writing practices.

The paper shows that on‐the‐job writing research is limited and research that has been done often focuses on criteria for good writing as defined by experts in the field. If all workplace writing‐practice research adopts this expert view, it offers no insight and understanding into what implicitly and explicitly guides writers. Writing‐practice research also needs to focus on the voices of writers so that the influence of human social behaviour on these practices can be understood.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the nature of the academic skills deficits in male offenders and their relation to neurocognitive deficits.

In total, 72 Finnish male prisoners were tested with regard to reading, spelling, and mathematical abilities.

Low academic skills, especially reading, were related to poor neurocognitive performance in verbal memory, visual memory, attention, and motor dexterity. The results showed a high number (29-36 percent) of reading and spelling disorders. In all, 15 percent of those with medium to severe problems in academic skills had marked difficulties in mathematics. In total, 88 percent of the participants with at least one problem area in literacy skills had neurocognitive deficits. In the present study, the pervasive neurocognitive deficits, occurring comorbidly with reading and spelling difficulties, seem to refer to a fundamental set of deficits which are only minimally explained by IQ, educational background or training.

Reading and spelling difficulties could be seen as functional illiteracy which, combined with a broad spectrum of neuropsychological function deficits, pose a challenging task for rehabilitation. Only after proper identification of deficits has been achieved is it possible to set goals and select the appropriate means for rehabilitation. One obvious limitation is the moderate number of subjects (n=72).

It may not be enough just to train reading or develop literacy activities among prisoners; focussing intervention on comprehensive neurocognitive deficits is also necessary.

Correlates and comorbidity between academic difficulties and neurocognitive deficits among offenders, especially in arithmetic difficulties, have been less studied.