the importance of research writing in school

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11.1 The Purpose of Research Writing

Learning objectives.

• Identify reasons to research writing projects.
• Outline the steps of the research writing process.

Why was the Great Wall of China built? What have scientists learned about the possibility of life on Mars? What roles did women play in the American Revolution? How does the human brain create, store, and retrieve memories? Who invented the game of football, and how has it changed over the years?

You may know the answers to these questions off the top of your head. If you are like most people, however, you find answers to tough questions like these by searching the Internet, visiting the library, or asking others for information. To put it simply, you perform research.

Whether you are a scientist, an artist, a paralegal, or a parent, you probably perform research in your everyday life. When your boss, your instructor, or a family member asks you a question that you do not know the answer to, you locate relevant information, analyze your findings, and share your results. Locating, analyzing, and sharing information are key steps in the research process, and in this chapter, you will learn more about each step. By developing your research writing skills, you will prepare yourself to answer any question no matter how challenging.

Reasons for Research

When you perform research, you are essentially trying to solve a mystery—you want to know how something works or why something happened. In other words, you want to answer a question that you (and other people) have about the world. This is one of the most basic reasons for performing research.

But the research process does not end when you have solved your mystery. Imagine what would happen if a detective collected enough evidence to solve a criminal case, but she never shared her solution with the authorities. Presenting what you have learned from research can be just as important as performing the research. Research results can be presented in a variety of ways, but one of the most popular—and effective—presentation forms is the research paper . A research paper presents an original thesis, or purpose statement, about a topic and develops that thesis with information gathered from a variety of sources.

If you are curious about the possibility of life on Mars, for example, you might choose to research the topic. What will you do, though, when your research is complete? You will need a way to put your thoughts together in a logical, coherent manner. You may want to use the facts you have learned to create a narrative or to support an argument. And you may want to show the results of your research to your friends, your teachers, or even the editors of magazines and journals. Writing a research paper is an ideal way to organize thoughts, craft narratives or make arguments based on research, and share your newfound knowledge with the world.

Write a paragraph about a time when you used research in your everyday life. Did you look for the cheapest way to travel from Houston to Denver? Did you search for a way to remove gum from the bottom of your shoe? In your paragraph, explain what you wanted to research, how you performed the research, and what you learned as a result.

Research Writing and the Academic Paper

No matter what field of study you are interested in, you will most likely be asked to write a research paper during your academic career. For example, a student in an art history course might write a research paper about an artist’s work. Similarly, a student in a psychology course might write a research paper about current findings in childhood development.

Having to write a research paper may feel intimidating at first. After all, researching and writing a long paper requires a lot of time, effort, and organization. However, writing a research paper can also be a great opportunity to explore a topic that is particularly interesting to you. The research process allows you to gain expertise on a topic of your choice, and the writing process helps you remember what you have learned and understand it on a deeper level.

Research Writing at Work

Knowing how to write a good research paper is a valuable skill that will serve you well throughout your career. Whether you are developing a new product, studying the best way to perform a procedure, or learning about challenges and opportunities in your field of employment, you will use research techniques to guide your exploration. You may even need to create a written report of your findings. And because effective communication is essential to any company, employers seek to hire people who can write clearly and professionally.

Writing at Work

Take a few minutes to think about each of the following careers. How might each of these professionals use researching and research writing skills on the job?

• Medical laboratory technician
• Small business owner
• Information technology professional
• Freelance magazine writer

A medical laboratory technician or information technology professional might do research to learn about the latest technological developments in either of these fields. A small business owner might conduct research to learn about the latest trends in his or her industry. A freelance magazine writer may need to research a given topic to write an informed, up-to-date article.

Think about the job of your dreams. How might you use research writing skills to perform that job? Create a list of ways in which strong researching, organizing, writing, and critical thinking skills could help you succeed at your dream job. How might these skills help you obtain that job?

Steps of the Research Writing Process

How does a research paper grow from a folder of brainstormed notes to a polished final draft? No two projects are identical, but most projects follow a series of six basic steps.

These are the steps in the research writing process:

• Choose a topic.
• Plan and schedule time to research and write.
• Conduct research.
• Organize research and ideas.
• Draft your paper.
• Revise and edit your paper.

Each of these steps will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. For now, though, we will take a brief look at what each step involves.

Step 1: Choosing a Topic

As you may recall from Chapter 8 “The Writing Process: How Do I Begin?” , to narrow the focus of your topic, you may try freewriting exercises, such as brainstorming. You may also need to ask a specific research question —a broad, open-ended question that will guide your research—as well as propose a possible answer, or a working thesis . You may use your research question and your working thesis to create a research proposal . In a research proposal, you present your main research question, any related subquestions you plan to explore, and your working thesis.

Step 2: Planning and Scheduling

Before you start researching your topic, take time to plan your researching and writing schedule. Research projects can take days, weeks, or even months to complete. Creating a schedule is a good way to ensure that you do not end up being overwhelmed by all the work you have to do as the deadline approaches.

During this step of the process, it is also a good idea to plan the resources and organizational tools you will use to keep yourself on track throughout the project. Flowcharts, calendars, and checklists can all help you stick to your schedule. See Chapter 11 “Writing from Research: What Will I Learn?” , Section 11.2 “Steps in Developing a Research Proposal” for an example of a research schedule.

Step 3: Conducting Research

When going about your research, you will likely use a variety of sources—anything from books and periodicals to video presentations and in-person interviews.

Your sources will include both primary sources and secondary sources . Primary sources provide firsthand information or raw data. For example, surveys, in-person interviews, and historical documents are primary sources. Secondary sources, such as biographies, literary reviews, or magazine articles, include some analysis or interpretation of the information presented. As you conduct research, you will take detailed, careful notes about your discoveries. You will also evaluate the reliability of each source you find.

Step 4: Organizing Research and the Writer’s Ideas

When your research is complete, you will organize your findings and decide which sources to cite in your paper. You will also have an opportunity to evaluate the evidence you have collected and determine whether it supports your thesis, or the focus of your paper. You may decide to adjust your thesis or conduct additional research to ensure that your thesis is well supported.

Remember, your working thesis is not set in stone. You can and should change your working thesis throughout the research writing process if the evidence you find does not support your original thesis. Never try to force evidence to fit your argument. For example, your working thesis is “Mars cannot support life-forms.” Yet, a week into researching your topic, you find an article in the New York Times detailing new findings of bacteria under the Martian surface. Instead of trying to argue that bacteria are not life forms, you might instead alter your thesis to “Mars cannot support complex life-forms.”

Step 5: Drafting Your Paper

Now you are ready to combine your research findings with your critical analysis of the results in a rough draft. You will incorporate source materials into your paper and discuss each source thoughtfully in relation to your thesis or purpose statement.

When you cite your reference sources, it is important to pay close attention to standard conventions for citing sources in order to avoid plagiarism , or the practice of using someone else’s words without acknowledging the source. Later in this chapter, you will learn how to incorporate sources in your paper and avoid some of the most common pitfalls of attributing information.

Step 6: Revising and Editing Your Paper

In the final step of the research writing process, you will revise and polish your paper. You might reorganize your paper’s structure or revise for unity and cohesion, ensuring that each element in your paper flows into the next logically and naturally. You will also make sure that your paper uses an appropriate and consistent tone.

Once you feel confident in the strength of your writing, you will edit your paper for proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and formatting. When you complete this final step, you will have transformed a simple idea or question into a thoroughly researched and well-written paper you can be proud of!

Review the steps of the research writing process. Then answer the questions on your own sheet of paper.

• In which steps of the research writing process are you allowed to change your thesis?
• In step 2, which types of information should you include in your project schedule?
• What might happen if you eliminated step 4 from the research writing process?

Key Takeaways

• People undertake research projects throughout their academic and professional careers in order to answer specific questions, share their findings with others, increase their understanding of challenging topics, and strengthen their researching, writing, and analytical skills.
• The research writing process generally comprises six steps: choosing a topic, scheduling and planning time for research and writing, conducting research, organizing research and ideas, drafting a paper, and revising and editing the paper.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

• Our Mission

Why Students Should Write in All Subjects

Writing improves learning by consolidating information in long-term memory, researchers explain. Plus, five engaging writing activities to use in all subjects.

For Kyle Pahigian, a 10th-grade math teacher at University Park Campus School in Massachusetts, a lesson on congruent triangles doesn’t start with calculators and protractors. Instead, she hands her students a treasure map and asks them to write detailed directions—using landmarks as a guide—to the buried treasure.

“I won’t tell the kids right away, ‘Today we’re going to learn about triangle congruence theorems,’” said Pahigian. “I want them to instead view it as them experimenting with something and doing something that they feel like they’re really good at.” Students often feel intimidated by math, and transforming the activity into a writing exercise eases some of the anxiety of introducing difficult concepts, she said.

In Pahigian’s math class, writing is regularly used as a learning strategy, one that gives her a window into her students’ thinking. “I like to do low-stakes writing when we’re coming up with definitions,” said Pahigian. Instead of telling her students what a polygon is, for example, she’ll show them a set of polygons and a set of non-polygons, and ask them, “What do you notice? What differences do you see?” Students spend a few minutes writing down their answers, and then join groups to compare responses.

“It’s really interesting and fun for me to read what they’ve written, because I can see all the questions. I can see the process,” said Pahigian.

A recent study sheds light on why writing is such a beneficial activity—not just in subjects typically associated with writing, like history and English, but across all subjects. Professor Steve Graham and his colleagues at Arizona State University’s Teachers College analyzed 56 studies looking at the benefits of writing in science, social studies, and math and found that writing “reliably enhanced learning” across all grade levels. While teachers commonly ask students to write about a topic in order to assess how well they understand the material, the process of writing also improves a student’s ability to recall information, make connections between different concepts, and synthesize information in new ways. In effect, writing isn’t just a tool to assess learning, it also promotes it.

Strengthening Memories

Why is writing effective? “Writing about content material facilitates learning by consolidating information in long-term memory,” explain Graham and his colleagues, describing a process known as the retrieval effect . As previous research has shown , information is quickly forgotten if it’s not reinforced, and writing helps to strengthen a student’s memories of the material they’re learning.

It’s the same cognitive mechanism that explains why practice tests are effective : In a 2014 study, students who took low-stakes practice tests in science and history classes scored 16 percentage points higher on their final exams than students who simply studied the material. “Practicing retrieval of recently studied information enhances the likelihood of the learner retrieving that information in the future,” the researchers of the 2014 study said.

Writing about a topic also encourages students to process information at a deeper level. Answering multiple-choice or short-answer questions may help with factual recall, but putting thoughts on paper encourages students to evaluate different ideas, weighing the importance of each one and considering the order they should be presented in, Graham and his colleagues write. By doing so, students may make new connections between ideas, ones they may not have made when initially learning the information.

A Metacognitive Tool

Students often believe that they understand a topic, but if they’re asked to write it down—and explain it—gaps in their understanding may be revealed. One of the most effective writing strategies that Graham and his colleagues found was metacognitive prompting, in which students are asked not only to recall information but also to apply what they’ve learned to different contexts by thinking about multiple sides of a position or making predictions based on what they currently know. For example, instead of simply reading about ecosystems in a textbook, students can write about their own impact by examining how much trash their household produces or the environmental impact of producing the food they eat.

5 Writing Strategies to Use in Any Subject

Here are a variety of ideas teachers have shared with Edutopia in recent years on incorporating writing into a variety of subjects.

“I wonder” journals: At Crellin Elementary School in Oakland, Maryland, teachers encouraged students to ask “I wonder” questions to push their learning beyond the classroom. After visiting a local barn and garden, for example, Dave Miller realized his fifth-grade students had more questions about animals and plants than he had time to answer, so he had them write down anything they were confused or curious about, which helped him plan future lessons and experiments.

“If they don’t wonder, ‘How would we ever survive on the moon?’ then that’s never going to be explored,” said Dana McCauley, Crellin’s principal. “But that doesn’t mean they should stop wondering, because wonderings lead to thinking outside the box, which makes them critical thinkers. As they try to figure it out, and reflect on what they’re doing, that’s where it all ties together for them. That’s where all that learning occurs—where all the connections start being made.”

Travel journals: Every student at Normal Park Museum Magnet, a K–8 school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, created a travel journal to chart their learning. These journals included not only charts, drawings, and graphic organizers, but also writing and reflection pieces that capture students’ learning about a topic.

When fifth-grade teacher Denver Huffstutler began a unit on earth science, he asked his students to imagine they were explorers looking for a new world that could sustain life. In their travel journal, they kept track of everything they were learning, from the impact of man-made disasters to their designs and calculations for a manned rocket that could reach distant planets.

Low-stakes writing: Writing can be daunting, so teachers at University Park Campus School used daily low-stakes writing activities to foster student voice, self-confidence, and critical thinking skills—a school-wide strategy used in every subject.

“The most important thing about it for me is that it’s not censored, and it’s not too highly structured,” said seventh-grade science teacher James Kobialka. “It’s about them getting their own ideas down, and then being able to interact with those ideas, change them, and revise them if they’re not correct.”

For example, when Kobialka’s students were learning about the conservation of mass, he didn’t start by defining it—he showed them a picture and asked, “What do you notice about the atoms on both sides? How can you explain that?” Students wrote down their observations, and the entire class came up with a definition. “From there,” he said, “once that consensus is formed, I’ll ask somebody to write it on the board, and we’ll talk about the key concepts.”

Student-created magazines: In Alessandra King’s algebra class, students created a magazine with dozens of articles about real world applications of math. For each article, they selected a primary source—an article from Scientific American , for example—read it closely, and then wrote a summary. Students wrote about a range of topics, from gerrymandering to fractals in Jackson Pollock’s paintings to invisibility cloaks.

“Effective writing clarifies and organizes a student’s thoughts, and the slow pace of writing is conducive to student learning because it allows them to reason carefully to make sure they’re correct before they state their thoughts,” King wrote. “Studies have shown that writing is valuable specifically for the math classroom—for example, it seems that a student’s ability to explain concepts in writing is related to the ability to comprehend and apply them.”

Creative writing: Former teachers Ed Kang and Amy Schwartzbach-Kang incorporated storytelling and creative writing into their after-school program’s science lessons. For example, they asked students to imagine a creature that could survive in a local habitat —the Chicago River, in their case. What color would it be? What features would help it to survive and defend itself? How would it hunt its prey? Students then wrote a story about their creature that combined science concepts with creative storytelling.

“There’s brain science to support using stories to help kids engage with content and create personal meaning,” explained Kang, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience. “Listening to facts mainly stimulates the two language-processing areas of the brain. However, when we listen to a story, additional parts of the brain are also activated—regions involved with our senses and motor movements help listeners actually ‘feel’ the descriptions.”

Research and teaching writing

• Published: 12 July 2021
• Volume 34 , pages 1613–1621, ( 2021 )

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• Steve Graham 1 , 2 &
• Rui A. Alves 3  

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Writing is an essential but complex skill that students must master if they are to take full advantage of educational, occupational, and civic responsibilities. Schools, and the teachers who work in them, are tasked with teaching students how to write. Knowledge about how to teach writing can be obtained from many different sources, including one’s experience teaching or being taught to write, observing others teach writing, and advise offered by writing experts. It is difficult to determine if much of the lore teachers acquire through these methods are effective, generalizable, or reliable unless they are scientifically tested. This special issue of Reading & Writing includes 11 writing intervention studies conducted primarily with students in the elementary grades. It provides important new information on evidence-based writing practices.

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There are many different ways that teachers can learn about how to teach writing. One way of acquiring such knowledge is by teaching this skill to others. As teachers apply different instructional procedures, they form judgments about the value and efficacy of these practices. In essence, they learn by doing (Graham, 2018 ).

A second way teachers learn about how to teach writing is by observing others and learning from them (Graham, 2018 ). Teachers likely remember some of the instructional methods used by those who taught them to write (e.g., teachers, mentors, parents, guardians, and peers). They may in turn adopt some of these practices when they teach their own students. This may be particularly true for instructional practices they considered effective.

Teachers can gain additional insight into teaching writing by observing and absorbing insights offered by others who have taught writing or studied how to teach it. This includes knowledge acquired from instructors teaching literacy and writing courses as well as experts offering advice on writing instruction at conferences, through workshops, podcasts, or other forms of information sharing. Teachers may also learn about teaching writing by discussing this topic with their peers or observing them as they teach writing.

A third source of knowledge that teachers can access are published materials about how to teach writing. This includes textbooks and articles on the subject, curriculum guides, commercial materials, and position statements from professional organizations to provide just a few examples. These resources can further involve digital sources such as videos demonstrating how to apply specific writing procedures, experts promoting specific teaching techniques, or web sites devoted to writing instruction.

The concern

Given all of the possible knowledge sources teachers can access or experience, there is an abundance of information, recommendations, and teaching materials on how to teach writing that is available to teachers. This blessing experiences at least one serious limitation. Too often, there is limited, circumscribed, or no evidence that the proffered advice, know-how, or wisdom works. There are many claims about what is effective, but too little proof. Unfortunately, this observation applies to much of the lore that teachers acquire about writing instruction.

Teaching lore mainly involves writing practices teachers experienced when they learned to write, instructional practices teachers develop and apply with their students, writing practices they see other teachers apply, and teaching practices promoted by experts (Graham & Harris, 2014 ). While we have no doubt that teachers and experts possess considerable knowledge and insight about how to teach writing, basing the teaching of this complex skill on such lore alone is risky.

Why is this the case? One reason is that it is difficult to determine which aspects of teaching lore are valid. For example, there are many things a teacher does while teaching writing. When their students’ writing improves, they may attribute this change to specific procedures they applied. While this evaluation may be correct, it is also possible that this judgment is incorrect or only applies to some students or to a procedure in a given context.

Teachers are not the only ones who can succumb to such selective bias. Specific teaching lore promoted by writing experts are also susceptible to misinterpretation in terms of their effectiveness. To illustrate, writing experts can overestimate the impact of favored instructional methods, forming judgments consistent with their philosophical views on writing development or instruction. For instance, proponents of the whole language approach to learning to read and write believed that writing and reading develop naturally just like oral language (Goodman, 1992 ). Consistent with these beliefs, they championed an approach to literacy instruction based on the use of informal teaching methods (e.g., reading and writing for real purposes), while at the same time deemphasizing explicitly and systematically teaching students foundational writing and reading skills and strategies (Graham & Harris, 1997 ). Instead, these skills are only taught when the need arises, mostly through short mini-lessons. Advocates for whole language frequently promoted the effectiveness of this two-pronged approach (Begeron, 1990 ), without providing much in the way of empirical evidence that it was effective, or perhaps even more importantly, that it was as effective as other alternatives such as reading and writing programs that emphasized reading and writing for real purposes, coupled with systematic and explicit skills and strategy instruction (Graham & Harris, 1994 ). Even for fundamental writing skills such as spelling, there is considerable evidence that both informal teaching and explicit instruction are effective (Graham, 2000 ; Graham & Santangelo, 2014 ), while whole language approaches are fundamentally misguided about what is written language (Liberman, 1999 ).

Whole language is not the only approach to teaching writing that has suffered from questionable claims about its effectiveness. Even the venerable Donald Graves was guilty of this to some degree with the process approach to writing that he supported and advocated (see Smagorinski, 1987 ). The evidence he offered in support of his favored approach to teaching writing relied in large part on testimonials and exemplar writing of selected students, presenting a potentially overly optimistic assessment of this approach. This is not to say that the process approach is ineffective, as there is now considerable empirical evidence supporting the opposite conclusion (Sandmel & Graham, 2011 ). Instead, this example illustrates that adopting whole cloth even highly popular and widely used teaching lore without careful consideration of its effectiveness and the evidence available to support it can be risky. The lack of evidence or the type of evidence provided can make it extremely difficult for teachers or other interested parties to determine if the testimonials or evidence used to support specific teaching lore in writing are representative or atypical.

A third issue that makes some teaching lore risky is that it may be based on the experience of a single or a very small number of teachers. As an example, this can occur for knowledge a teacher acquires as a result of his or her experience teaching writing. The teaching practice(s) may in fact be effective for the students in this teacher’s classroom, but they may not be effective when applied by another teacher or with different students. Until this proposition is tested, there is no way to determine if this teaching lore will produce reliable results when applied more broadly.

As these concerns demonstrate, the validity, generalizability, and replicability of instructional practices based on teaching lore are uncertain. This is not to devalue what teachers or experts know, but to demonstrate the limits of this knowledge.

Evidence-based writing practices

The concerns about the value of teaching lore raised above raises the question: How should the structure and details of writing instruction be determined? The solution that we recommend is to take an evidence-based practice approach to both enhance teachers’ knowledge and develop writing instruction. Starting with medicine in the 1990s, and spreading quickly to psychology, informational science, business, education, and a host of other disciplines, this movement promoted the idea that practitioners in a field should apply the best scientific evidence available to make informed and judicious decisions for their clients (Sackett et al., 1996 ). The basic assumption underlying this approach is that the findings from research can positively impact practice. The evidence-based practice movement was a reaction to practitioners basing what they did almost strictly on tradition and lore, without scientific evidence to validate it.

One reason why this represents a positive step forward in education and the teaching of writing is that instructional practices based on high quality intervention research addresses the three issues of concern we raised about teaching lore. First, high quality intervention studies address the issue of validity. They are designed specifically to isolate the effects of a specific instructional practice or set of instructional practices. They provide systematically gathered evidence on whether the instructional practices tested produced the desired impact. They further apply methodological procedures to rule out alternative explanations for observed effects. Second, high quality intervention studies address issues of generalizability by describing the participants and the context in which the practice was applied, and by using statistical procedures to determine the confidence that can be placed in specific findings. Three, they address the issue of replicability, as the replication of effects across multiple situations is the hall mark of scientific testing (Graham & Harris, 2014 ).

Another reason why the evidence-based approach represents a positive step forward in terms of teaching writing is that the evidence gathered from high quality intervention studies can provide a general set of guidelines for designing an effective writing program. Graham et al. ( 2016 ) created such a roadmap by drawing on three sources of scientific evidence: true-and quasi- experimental writing intervention studies, single-case design studies, and qualitative studies of how exceptional literacy teachers taught writing (see also Graham & Harris, 2018 ). They indicated that the scientific evidence from these three sources supports the development of writing programs that include the following. Students write frequently. They are supported by teachers and peers as they write. Essential writing skills, strategies, and knowledge are taught. Students use word processors and other twenty-first century tools to write. Writing occurs in a positive and motivating environment. Writing is used to support learning. Based on several recent meta-analyses of high quality intervention studies (Graham, et al., 2018a , b ; Graham, et al., 2018a , b ), Graham now recommends that the evidence also supports connecting writing and reading instruction (Graham, 2019 , 2020 ).

A third reason why the evidence-based approach is a positive development is that it provides teachers with a variety of techniques for teaching writing that have been shown to be effective in other teachers’ classes and in multiple situations. While this does not guarantee that a specific evidence-based practices is effective in all situations, a highly unlikely proposition for any writing practice, it does provide teachers with instructional procedures with a proven track record. This includes, but is not limited to (Graham & Harris, 2018 ; Graham et al., 2016 ):

Setting goals for writing.

Teaching general as well as genre-specific strategies for planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process. Engaging students in prewriting practices for gathering, organizing, and evaluation possible writing contents and plans.

Teaching sentence construction skills with sentence-combining procedures.

Providing students with feedback about their writing and their progress learning new writing skills.

Teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing.

Increasing how much students write; analyzing and emulating model texts.

Teaching vocabulary for writing.

Creating routines for students to help each other as they write.

Putting into place procedures for enhancing motivation.

Teaching paragraph writing skills.

Employing technology such as word processing that makes it easier to write.

It is also important to realize that an evidence-based approach to writing does not mean that teachers should abandon the hard-earned knowledge they have acquired through their experiences as teachers or learners. The evidence-based movement emphasizes that teachers contextualize knowledge about teaching writing acquired through research with their own knowledge about their students, the context in which they work, and what they know about writing and teaching it (Graham et al., 2016 ). When applying instructional practices acquired through research as well as teaching lore, we recommend that teachers weigh the benefits, limitations, and possible harm that might ensue as a consequence of applying any teaching procedure. Once a decision is made to apply a specific practice, it is advisable to monitor its effectiveness and make adjustments as needed.

Finally, while the scientific testing of writing practices has provided considerable insight into how writing can be taught effectively, it is not broad, deep, or rich enough to tell us all we need to know about teaching writing. It is highly unlikely that this will ever be the case. We operate on the principle that there is no single best method for teaching writing to all students, nor is it likely that science will provide us with formulas to prescribe exactly how writing should be taught to each student individually. Writing, learning, children, and the contexts in which they operate are just too complex to make this a likely consequence of the evidence-based movement. As a result, we believe that the best writing instruction will be provided by teachers who apply evidence-based practices in conjunction with the best knowledge they have acquired as teachers and learners, using each of these forms of knowledge in an intelligent, judicious, and critical manner.

Over time, we anticipate that evidence-based practices will play an ever increasing role in the process described above. This is inevitable as our knowledge about evidence-based writing practices expands. This brings us to the purpose of this special issue of Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal . This special issue presents 11 writing intervention studies focusing almost exclusively with students in the elementary grades. These studies were conducted in Europe and the United States, and they replicate and extend prior research conducted with young developing writers.

The special issue

Perhaps the most tested writing instructional practice of all time, and the one yielding the largest effects sizes (Graham et al., 2013 ), is the Self-regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model developed by Karen Harris (see Harris et al., 2008 for a description of this approach). Several studies in the current special issue tested specific iterations of the use of the SRSD model as a means for teaching writing to elementary grade students. Collins and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of teaching third grade students in the United States task specific strategies for planning and drafting expository essays using information from social studies text using this model. This instruction enhanced the quality of students’ texts and resulted in improvement on a norm-referenced measure of writing where students identified their favorite game and provided reasons why this was the case.

In a second SRSD study conducted with second and third grade children in Spain, Salas and her colleagues examined if teaching planning and drafting strategies for writing an opinion essay was equally effective with children from more and less disadvantaged backgrounds. SRSD was equally effective in improving the opinion writing of children from both backgrounds, but carryover effects to reading comprehension (a skill not taught in this study) only occurred for students from less disadvantaged backgrounds.

A third study by Rosario and his colleagues involved a secondary analysis of data from an investigation in Portugal where third grade students were taught to write narratives using SRSD procedures and a story writing tool they developed. Their reanalysis focused on students experiencing difficulties learning to write showing that they differed in their approach and perceptions of teacher feedback. The majority of these children were able to use the feedback provided by their teacher and viewed it as helpful.

A fourth investigation by Hebert and his colleagues taught fourth grade students in the United States to write informational text using five text structures (description, compare/contrast, sequence of events, problem–solution, and cause effect). While the authors did not indicate they used SRSD to teach these strategies, the teaching methods mirrored this approach. In any event, the instruction provided to these children enhanced how well they wrote all five of these different kinds of text. These effects, however, did not generalize to better reading performance.

Lopez and her colleagues in Spain examined three approaches to improving sixth grade students’ writing. Students in all three conditions were taught how to set communicative goals for their writing. Students in one treatment condition were taught a strategy for revising. Students in a second treatment condition observed a reader trying to comprehend a text and suggesting ways it might be improved. Control students continued with the goal setting procedures. Students in both treatment conditions improved their writing and revising skills more than control students, but there were no differences between these two treatments.

In another Spanish study conducted by Rodriguez-Malaga and colleagues, the impact of two different treatments on the writing of fourth grade students was examined. One treatment group learned how to set product goals for their writing, whereas the other writing treatment group learned how to set product goals and strategies for planning compare/contrast texts. Only the students in the product goal and planning strategy treatment evidenced improved writing when compared to control students.

Philippakos and Voggt examined the effectiveness of on-line practice-based professional development (PBPD) for teaching genre-based writing strategies. Eighty-four second grade teachers were randomly assigned to PBPD or a no-treatment control condition. Treatment teachers taught the genre-based writing strategies with high fidelity and rated PBPD positively. Even more importantly, their students writing evidenced greater improvement than the writing of students in control teachers’ classes.

Walter and her colleagues in England examined the effectiveness of two writing interventions, sentence combining and spelling instruction, with 7 to 10 year old children experiencing difficulties learning to write. As expected, sentence combining instruction improved sentence construction skills, but even more importantly, these researchers found that the degree of improvements in sentence writing was related to students’ initial sentence, spelling, and reading skills.

In another study focused on improving students’ sentence construction skills, Arfé and her colleagues in Italy examined the effectiveness of an oral language intervention to improve the sentence construction skills of fifth and tenth grade students. This oral treatment did enhance the sentence writing skills of the younger fifth grade students. This study provides needed evidence that interventions aimed at improving oral language skills transfer to writing.

Chung and his colleagues in the United States examined if sixth grade students’ writing can be improved through self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and self-reflection when they revised a timed, on-demand essay. These students as well as students in the control condition were also taught how to revise such an essay. Treatment students evidenced greater writing gains, and were more confident about their revising capabilities than control students.

Lastly, Graham and his colleagues in the United States examined if the revising behavior of fourth grade students experiencing difficulties with writing can be enhanced through the use of revising goals that focused attention on making substantive when revising stories (e.g., change the setting of the story). Applying such goals across four stories had a positive effect on the revising behavior of these students when these goals were not in effect, resulting in more text-level revisions, more revisions that changed the meaning of text, and more revisions rated as improving text.

The 11 intervention studies in this special issue of Reading & Writing are particularly noteworthy for several reasons. One, some of these studies ( n  = 4) concentrated on improving students’ skills in writing informational and expository text. This is an area that has not received enough attention in existing writing literature. Two, enhancing students’ revising was the goal of multiple studies ( n  = 4). Again, too little attention has been given to this topic with either younger or older students. Three, it was especially gratifying to see that a pair of studies examined how to enhance sentence writing skills. This has been a neglected area of writing research since the 1980s. Four, multiple studies focused on improving the writing of students who experienced difficulties learning to write ( n  = 3). This is an area where we need much more research if we are to maximize these students’ writing success. Finally, more than half of the studies in this special issue ( n  = 6) were conducted in Europe, with the other half conducted in the United States. It is important to examine if specific writing treatments are effective in different social, cultural, political, institutional, and historical context (Graham, 2018 ), as was done with the four studies that applied SRSD to teach students strategies for writing.

We hope you enjoy the studies presented here. We further hope they serve as a catalyst to improve your own research if you are a writing scholar or your teaching if you are a practitioner.

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Getting California kids to read: What will it take?

To improve literacy, focus on writing

Bita Nazarian

Jaime Balboa

Laura Brief

October 20, 2021.

We have all been reading the news about disappointing literacy rates in California, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic and online learning. Last month, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced a plan to improve literacy rates aimed at having all third graders in the state at reading level by 2026.

While this issue has made the news, it isn’t new. In fact, low literacy rates have been persistent and prevalent for decades, especially for students from low-income communities and students of color. Policymakers often exclusively focus on reading when addressing literacy gaps. However, research shows that writing skills help students become better readers and ultimately understand all subjects better.

On a national policy level, the critical importance of writing was underscored with the adoption of Common Core standards in 2010, which emphasize how writing must be taught and addressed across every subject area. Despite the focus on writing in the state standards, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress ( NAEP ) in 2011 found that nationwide, only 27% of high school seniors and 10% of Black and Hispanic students are proficient in writing. In 2016, a national survey found that half of teachers felt that they did not have sufficient professional development to successfully implement the current writing standards. We know a focus on effective writing instruction is essential to any effort to improve literacy rates.

Whereas reading is knowledge, writing is agency, power and influence.

Writing not only helps students master new material, but it also serves as a tool for self-expression, reflection and community building. Writing can create new worlds and bring imagination to life. In a society that has historically devalued the voices of young people of color, writing empowers them to tell their own stories, succeed in school and career, engage in our national dialogue and become leaders in a global information economy. Writing skills are essential to building a just, equitable and democratic society where every voice matters.

In our research report, The Truth About Writing in America , we interviewed 19 experts in literacy education, including leading researchers, educators and writers, on the current state of writing education — its benefits as well as challenges. While the field has moved forward in some ways, many of the challenges remain. And while the data is daunting, we know that our students are capable of achieving so much more with the right support.

Let’s bring writing instruction front and center. From our conversations with the expert panel, we put forward four recommendations that policymakers and practitioners can follow to strengthen writing education:

• Redefine the classroom: Encourage and support students to continue writing anywhere, anytime, and on anything, and with any platform.
• Reunite reading and writing: Make the relationship between reading and writing explicit through discussion, examples and publishing student work. And start early.
• Identify teachers as writers: Establish communities of practice for teachers to learn, share and grow as writers.
• Level the playing field. Invest in responsive writing programming that meets the needs of students from low-income communities, students of color and English Learners.

As Hattie Bellino, a former 826 Valencia student, says, “My voice is important because my perspective and experiences have the power to shift my reality and my community’s reality towards equity.”

It is time to improve literacy WRITE NOW.

Bita Nazarian and Jaime Balboa are the executive directors of 826 Valencia and 826LA , nonprofit organizations dedicated to supporting under-resourced students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Laura Brief is the CEO of 826 National .

The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our  guidelines  and  contact us .

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Lori Gregg-Hammer 3 years ago 3 years ago

As a 20-year veteran teacher now doing a year of service with 826 Valencia through AmeriCorps, I cannot agree with this article more. I always struggled to teach writing to my students because I just didn't feel equipped to do the task. I love writing but I never really received strategic training on how to teach students how to write. "Identify teachers as writers: Establish communities of practice for teachers to learn, share and grow … Read More

As a 20-year veteran teacher now doing a year of service with 826 Valencia through AmeriCorps, I cannot agree with this article more. I always struggled to teach writing to my students because I just didn’t feel equipped to do the task. I love writing but I never really received strategic training on how to teach students how to write.

“Identify teachers as writers: Establish communities of practice for teachers to learn, share and grow as writers.”

This recommendation especially resonated with me as a writer, a teacher, a woman of color, and as one who hopes to help other people (young and old) own their identity as writers so they can amplify their own voices.

John Seethoff 3 years ago 3 years ago

Ralph mckay 3 years ago 3 years ago.

Congratulations on an excellent commentary. I loved this sentence: “Whereas reading is knowledge, writing is agency, power, and influence.”

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5 Reasons Your Students Should Write Every Day

Daily in-class writing can help your students discover the writer within.

Do students write every day in your classroom? 

If not, you’re not alone. Research on writing frequency suggests that just a quarter of middle and high school students write for at least 30 minutes a day, a minimum standard set by learning experts.

During my sixteen years as an ELA teacher, there were times my students wrote enough and times they did not. But, unsurprisingly, when I had my students writing every day, my students gained skills and confidence more quickly and I had greater insight into their lives.   

Why is writing important for students?

Studies suggest that teaching students how to write well is one of the best things educators can do to ensure academic engagement and future success. Of course, some students may struggle.

I remember one student—we’ll call her Imani—who would sit in class and stare at her blank computer screen as the minutes ticked by. She sighed, she groaned, she started writing and hit the delete key almost immediately. She seemed to feel like everything was riding on crafting the perfect paragraph. 

Now, I think about how she would have responded if I had added short, low-stakes writing sessions to our daily schedule. If she came to class knowing she would write every day, would she feel less pressure to “get it right?” Probably. Would she start to see that the only way to become a better writer was to write frequently? Likely. Would writing begin to feel more attainable and perhaps even a little rewarding? Definitely!   

From building confidence to fostering metacognition, the benefits of daily writing are worth the time invested. Here are the top five research-backed reasons why writing every day is important for students.

1. Writing is good for mental health and capacity.

Anyone who writes in a journal every day can talk about the emotional benefits of having a place to clarify their thoughts and work through their emotions. And it turns out that science confirms these benefits. There are more than 200 studies that show the positive effect of writing on mental health .

Not only can writing help students understand their emotions, it can also help their brains run more efficiently. A study funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health showed that anxiety takes up a tremendous amount of brainpower. However, when daily writing soothes students’ worries, cognitive resources are freed up to work on other tasks.

Jason Moser, one of the study's authors, explains, “Students who wrote about their worries were able to offload these worries and run more like a brand new Prius. Whereas the students who didn’t offload their worries ran more like a ’74 Impala—guzzling more brain gas to achieve the same outcomes.”

2. Writing strengthens executive functions.

Executive functions are the mental processes that enable us to plan, pay attention, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. Given how many executive function skills are used in the writing process, it's no wonder that many children who struggle with executive function find writing to be daunting. But this skill overlap means that strengthening writing and executive function skills simultaneously is an effective way to learn.   

When teaching writing to students who struggle with executive function, you’ll want to give detailed instructions and models for every step of the writing process, along with frequent check-ins and practice time. If you just tell students to “write a paragraph,” they might not know where to begin and stall out quickly. But if you review steps, help them make a plan, and teach them to assess their work with rubrics, they’ll improve their writing and practice crucial executive function skills simultaneously.  

3. Writing helps educators assess student learning.

In a piece about teaching literacy in her math classroom , former teacher Sarah Galasso shares how she was surprised when a high-performing student wrote that she was confused about classwork. Equipped with this intel, Galasso adjusted her feedback to boost this student’s confidence and help her see that she understood much more than she thought she did. 

Reading student writing gives teachers valuable insight into how students are progressing in class and also who they are as people—what their likes, dislikes, concerns, and dreams are. The more we know, the more we can invite students to share all parts of themselves, which builds an asset-based classroom . 

Lastly, reading student writing regularly lets you monitor how your students are doing with their social-emotional learning . You’ll gain insight into any emotional road bumps they’re encountering and also be able to identify students who may need more support.  

4. Writing cultivates creativity.

Creativity, as psychologists define it, is the ability to come up with original and useful ideas. And contrary to popular opinion, creativity can be taught . Combining seemingly unrelated ideas, working backward to solve a problem, and challenging assumptions, are three ways, among many, we can ignite creativity.

Another way to build creativity is through daily writing . Writing encourages students to use their imaginations, make connections, view a problem in various ways, strategize solutions, and tell stories. Writing also lets students exercise agency and feel joy at creating something new.  

5. Writing encourages reflection and self-awareness. 

Writing requires students to reflect , and the metacognitive skill of thinking about thinking is an invaluable learning tool. When students can reflect upon what they know, don't know, and would like to learn more about, they’ll be able to consolidate information, ask the right questions, self-direct when acquiring new knowledge, and take ownership over their learning.      

Writing every day can also increase students’ self-awareness by helping them learn from their experiences. Research suggests that becoming more self-aware can increase our confidence and encourage us to be more accepting of others . Confident students tend to fare better academically and socially, and strong classroom communities rely on students embracing one another’s differences.  

All Students Can Be Writers

Think back to Imani, my student who didn’t know how to start writing. Now imagine her walking into her classroom knowing that she’s there to write. She sits down, takes out her computer, and gets to it.  

Her writing isn’t perfect, of course, but it’s improving. She’s learning that process is more important than perfection. She’s learning how to clarify her thinking and express herself effectively. Most importantly, her writing confidence has soared, and every day, she’s building skills that will improve her future.

Emily Anderson, PhD

• Content Marketing Specialist
• Carnegie Learning, Inc.

Before joining Carnegie Learning’s marketing team in 2021, Emily Anderson spent 16 years teaching middle school, high school, and college English in classrooms throughout Virginia, Pennsylvania, California, and Minnesota. During these years, Emily developed a passion for designing exciting, relatable curricula and developing transformative teaching strategies. She holds master's degrees in English and Women’s Studies and a doctorate in American literature and lives for those classroom moments when students learn something that will forever change them. She loves helping amazing teachers achieve more of these moments in their classrooms.

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The Importance of Assessing Student Writing and Improving Writing Instruction

Writing is a critical 21st century skill. Today’s knowledge economy places a premium upon collaboration and written communication, which means that the skilled writer enters the job market at a significant advantage (Aschliman, 2016; Brandt, 2005). And yet students typically enter the job market with weak writing skills. Only 27% of 12th-grade students demonstrated proficiency in writing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (The Nation’s Report Card, 2022). Similarly, according to one recent study, only 27% of employers classified recent college graduates as “well-prepared” for written communication in the workplace (Stewart et al., 2016). Disparities in writing skills both reflect and contribute to inequities in our society. Certain groups, (e.g., people who identify as White and female) typically display stronger writing achievement, at least on the kinds of writing tasks that are highly valued in academic institutions and the professions (Roberts et al., 2017), with evidence that this leads to further inequities (Warren, 2013). Writing matters, and thus it is important to understand why so many students experience writing as deeply challenging and how they can be encouraged to develop their writing skills. For decades, writing has been a major focus of research for the ETS Research and Development (R&D) division. The results of our efforts include substantial contributions to the measurement and development of student writing skills, with important implications for teacher professional development and the improvement of teaching practice.

• https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/Research_Notes_Deane.pdf

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How students' writing motivation, teachers' personal and professional attributes, and writing instruction impact student writing achievement: a two-level hierarchical linear modeling study

Associated data.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Student motivation to write is a pivotal factor influencing their writing achievement. However, individual motivation to write is not independent of the learning environment. It also is crucial for teachers to develop their own efficacy, knowledge, and ability in writing and writing instruction to help them utilize effective instructional methods that stimulate students' motivation to write and further promote their writing achievement. Given these considerations, we utilized a two-level hierarchical linear model to examine the relationships among student motivation, teacher personal and professional traits, teacher writing instruction, and writing achievement at student and teacher levels. Our analysis of the dataset, which included 346 fourth and fifth graders nested within 41 classrooms, found that motivation had a positive predictive effect on writing ability at both student and teacher levels. Moreover, female students, fifth graders, and typically achieving students demonstrated higher writing achievement than their counterparts. While there were no significant effects of teacher efficacy, knowledge, ability, or professional development on student writing achievement, we observed that higher frequency of classroom management practices during writing instruction had a significant negative effect on student writing achievement. Our full model revealed that the relationship between student motivation and achievement was negatively moderated by teachers' increased use of instructional practices related to process features and using writing instruction materials, but positively moderated by increased use of varied teaching tactics. Overall, our findings emphasize the importance of contextual factors in understanding the complexity of student writing achievement and draw attention to the need for effective instructional practices to support students' writing development.

1. Introduction

The development of proficient writing skill is widely recognized as an indispensable component of K-12 education in the United States, as it empowers individuals to attain their academic, occupational, and personal aspirations (Graham, 2019 ; Sato and Thompson, 2020 ). However, the majority of young learners do not achieve mastery in the requisite writing behaviors and skills aligned with their grade-level expectations (Deane, 2011 ). This concerning trend is corroborated by the findings of the Nation Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which measures writing performance using the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The 2011 Nation's Report Card revealed that only 27% of twelfth-grade students demonstrated proficiency in writing, indicating a pervasive deficiency across the nation in constructing written responses that effectively accomplish the communicative purpose of writing, with proficient writing characterized by well-organized and coherent text with appropriate transitions and diverse sentence structure (NCES, 2011 ; Crossley and McNamara, 2016 ). In addition, half of learners encounter difficulties in even the most rudimentary aspects of writing, such as using detailed and factual descriptions, appropriate lexical choice, and varied sentence structures (NCES, 2011 ). The unprecedented decline in average scores across other core academic subjects (i.e., mathematics and reading) during the COVID-19 pandemic years, as reported in 2022 by the NCES, has further exacerbated concerns regarding writing deficiencies in the student population.

Examining the multitude of factors that influence writing performance represents a complex endeavor. Of these factors, student-level factors have garnered considerable research attention, given their direct and substantial influence on writing achievement (e.g., Maxwell et al., 2017 ; Coker et al., 2018 ). The existing writing models provide theoretical frameworks for understanding how the acquisition of writing skills and the production of written text can be influenced by individual factors. One such notable model is Hayes' ( 1996 ) cognitive model of writing, which underscores the central role of motivation and its enduring impact on student writing performance throughout the entire writing process. The model posits that motivation can facilitate both short-term responses to immediate writing goals and a long-term predisposition to engage in writing activities, even when they present challenging demands. Additionally, the model incorporates other individual factors, such as writing knowledge, working memory, and the ability to transcribe and translate ideas into conventional linguistic units, to account for the complexity of writing performance. Empirically, research has identified individual characteristics, such as motivational beliefs (e.g., Graham et al., 2018 ), writing knowledge (e.g., Saddler and Graham, 2007 ), working memory (e.g., Cordeiro et al., 2020 ), and writing-related behaviors and strategies (e.g., Graham et al., 2017b ; Wijekumar et al., 2019 ), as significant contributors to writing achievement on the individual level.

Meanwhile, individual differences in writing-related factors are contingent upon the environment and are amenable to change through teachers' personal and professional qualities, as well as their instructional practices. Extensive research shows that teachers' beliefs in their ability to write and teach writing effectively (e.g., Tschannen-Moran and Barr, 2004 ; Corkett et al., 2011 ), writing knowledge and abilities (e.g., Huang and Shimizu, 2016 ), and participation in professional development programs (e.g., Roberts, 2002 ; Fearn and Farnan, 2007 ), have a positive and lasting impact on their students' writing performance and development. Moreover, establishing a supportive and inclusive learning environment by adopting effective writing instructional practices (e.g., Lam and Law, 2007 ; Graham and Harris, 2013 ; De Smedt and Van Keer, 2014 ), incorporating cultural and linguistic diversity elements when designing writing curricula and assessments (e.g., Datnow et al., 2003 ; Shapiro et al., 2016 ), and organizing school-wide celebratory events (e.g., Bradshaw et al., 2009 ) can also promote writing success. These findings also resonate with Graham's ( 2018 ) writers-within-community perspective, which emphasizes the significance of contextual factors and writing communities in shaping the meaning, motivation, and effectiveness of writing. Effective writing instruction should not only align with individual goals but also consider the intended audience, norms, and conventions of the genre to enhance the quality of writing. To accomplish this, teachers are expected to possess pedagogical knowledge and attitudes for teaching quality writing and a deep understanding of the social policy forces that influence writing instruction (Troia et al., 2011 ; Harris and Graham, 2016 ).

Despite a substantial body of research exploring the effects of various factors on student writing achievement, the majority of studies have investigated the associations between writing achievement and influential factors at the student and teacher level independently, without considering their interactional effects (e.g., Graham et al., 2017a ; Bresina and McMaster, 2020 ; Wright et al., 2021 ). To address the complex nature and multilayered structure underlying writing achievement, it is essential for research to examine the nested relationships and consider the interplay of variables at higher levels through adopting multilevel analyses to mitigate aggregation bias and heterogeneity of regression (Anderson, 2012 ). Although some studies have investigated writing achievement from an integrated perspective by considering multilevel effects (e.g., Olinghouse, 2008 ; Mo and Troia, 2017 ), there is still much to explore regarding how these cross-level effects contribute to the effectiveness of writing instruction and ultimately lead to improved student writing achievement and what types of writing instructional actions can impact students' writing performance when considering their varying levels of writing motivation.

2. Student-level predictors of writing achievement

2.1. writing motivation.

Writing motivation has been a well-established area of research within the educational field, with recent conceptualizations highlighting the critical motivational and affective forces shaping students' perceived gains and losses in writing performance (e.g., Troia et al., 2013 ). Empirical evidence consistently suggests that motivated students demonstrate positive and strategic behaviors toward writing (e.g., Conroy et al., 2009 ; Wijekumar et al., 2019 ), expend extra effort on writing assignments (e.g., Hidi and Boscolo, 2006 ; Troia et al., 2012 ), persist in undertaking challenging writing tasks (e.g., Schrodt et al., 2019 ), actively seek feedback and guidance from teachers and peers (e.g., Williams and Takaku, 2011 ), collaborate with others to share writing ideas (e.g., Turner and Paris, 1995 ; Graham et al., 2017b ), self-regulate their learning to write (Zimmerman, 1990 ), and evaluate their drafts periodically (e.g., Boscolo and Hidi, 2006 ). These behaviors enable students to complete writing tasks successfully, resulting in longer and better texts and further reinforcing their enthusiasm for writing (e.g., Graham et al., 2018 ).

Research has provided compelling evidence of the significant and positive associations between writing motivation and outcomes. For instance, a meta-analysis conducted by Camacho et al. ( 2021 ) revealed that multiple motivational constructs, such as self-efficacy and attitudes toward writing, were moderately associated with writing performance. Conversely, the positive impact of performance on motivational levels has also been observed, as students who experience success in writing tasks tend to exhibit higher levels of motivation. A recent systematic review by Alves-Wold et al. ( 2023 ) investigated self-reported writing motivation, with a specific focus on K-5 students. The review found that motivational levels varied depending on students' ability level and that students' self-efficacy beliefs were positively related to their actual writing performance, with changes in performance affecting motivation levels. Additionally, the review examined the construct validity of student self-reported motivational scales and highlighted the importance of designing motivational measures that align with their intended purpose and design features.

2.2. Individual demographic characteristics

The impact of demographic factors such as gender, grade, and learning ability on student writing achievement has been extensively analyzed in the literature on writing motivation and achievement. Research has yielded a mixture of findings regarding gender differences in writing motivation. Girls tend to report higher levels of achievement-oriented goals and self-efficacy beliefs than boys, as they often attribute their successes to effort and hard work (Pajares et al., 2000 ). However, girls possess lower self-esteem than boys, and their expectations for success may be undermined as writing tasks becomes increasingly difficult (Hidi et al., 2002 ). Boys, on the other hand, tend to rate their confidence higher than girls, potentially due to their more positive beliefs about their own writing ability (Pajares and Johnson, 1996 ). There are a few studies that demonstrated no statistically significant differences between male and female students in certain motivational constructs, such as in self-efficacy beliefs. For example, other gender-related factors, such as gender orientation (i.e., stereotypical beliefs about gender and task performance that students usually hold; Pajares and Valiante, 2001 ), may confound the effects of gender on writing motivation and achievement. Hence, gender can be regarded as a proxy variable that is associated with motivational beliefs and can explain writing achievement.

Numerous studies have examined the relationship between grade level and writing motivation, with varying results. Generally, lower grade students exhibit higher levels of self-efficacy beliefs compared to their counterparts in higher grades. For example, Shell et al. ( 1995 ) discovered that fourth graders reported significantly higher levels of self-efficacy, effort, and intelligence than 7th and 10th graders. In contrast, 7th graders showed little difference compared with 10th graders, except for self-efficacy beliefs where there was a slight decrease among 10th graders. This tendency is consistent with other studies demonstrating that writing motivation may decrease as early as Grade 3 and remain stable through middle and high school (Koster et al., 2015 ; James et al., 2017 ). This decline in motivation could be attributed to the increasing difficulty of writing tasks (Boscolo and Gelati, 2019 ) and the attainment of more accurate self-perception (Stipek, 1993 ) as students' progress through school. Empirical investigations (e.g., Pajares, 2003 ; Pajares et al., 2007a ) have consistently indicated a weakening trend in writing motivation among students as they advance in their academic careers. However, some studies have sought to identify the nuances of writing motives. For instance, Rasteiro and Limpo's ( 2023 ) research revealed that middle school students demonstrated greater confidence in their use of the conventions of writing than higher-level cognitive skills such as ideation and self-regulation. Furthermore, they observed that middle school students were motivated to engage in writing activities by a combination of intrinsic (e.g., curiosity) and extrinsic (e.g., assignment grade) factors. It is also noteworthy that the relationship between a writers' abilities and their level of motivation may shift as they gain more experience and proficiency in writing (Pajares et al., 2007b ).

In addition, a student's learning ability can play a vital role in determining their level of motivation and achievement in writing. Individuals with higher learning ability often possess more advanced cognitive and metacognitive skills that allow them to comprehend and analyze complex texts, generate and organize ideas, and employ effective writing strategies (Karlen and Compagnoni, 2017 ). These skills can boost their confidence and motivation to engage in writing activities. Conversely, students with lower learning ability may struggle with these skills, leading to frustration and reduced motivation to write. They may also encounter difficulties in mastering basic writing techniques such as spelling, grammar, and punctuation, which can further impede their writing progress and diminish their confidence and motivational beliefs (Troia et al., 2009 ; Roitsch et al., 2021 ). Brouwer's ( 2012 ) study found that students experiencing language learning impairment had diminished perceptions of their writing competence and their autonomous writing motivation. Although language learning ability did not necessarily have a direct association with student writing motivation, it could function as a moderator that influences the connection between motivation and writing quality. This is because language learning ability influences the proficiency with which students can articulate their thoughts in written form and can further decrease their motivation and writing outcomes if impaired.

3. Teacher-level predictors of writing achievement

3.1. teacher efficacy beliefs.

Although the body of research on teacher-level factors influencing students' writing performance is not as extensive as that on student-level factors, it is equally important to recognize their role in promoting students' writing proficiency, positive learning environment, and motivational beliefs (Graham et al., 2001 ). A teacher's self-efficacy beliefs is one of the most critical teacher-level factors that can lead to effective writing instruction. It can manifest in various aspects. Firstly, teachers with a strong sense of self-efficacy are more likely to adopt evidence-based teaching approaches that are multimodal and innovative (Posnanski, 2002 ) and demonstrate empathy and cater to the diverse needs of their students (Goroshit and Hen, 2016 ). Secondly, teachers with strong efficacy beliefs can enhance writing curriculum and assessment by dedicating more time to teaching grammar, mechanics, and content-level skills, such as developing ideas and text structures (Handtke and Bögeholz, 2019 ; Wyatt and Dikilitaş, 2021 ). Furthermore, they can enhance classroom management by implementing strategies to motivate students to write (Mojavezi and Tamiz, 2012 ), organizing in-class events and discussions on writing (Myhill et al., 2013 ), managing their classes efficiently to prevent disruptive behaviors (Poulou et al., 2019 ), and avoiding overly criticizing student errors (Shaukat and Iqbal, 2012 ). Collectively, these practices can help emphasize the importance of writing within the class, increase student engagement and enthusiasm, and achieve desired writing instruction outcomes.

A teacher's sense of efficacy is also influenced by contextual factors beyond their personal capabilities, such as professional development and teacher training programs (Posnanski, 2002 ), school resources and materials (Lee et al., 2011 ), and statewide assessment policies and high-stakes testing (Gonzalez et al., 2017 ). Troia and Graham's ( 2016 ) national survey found that teachers' beliefs and attitudes toward the Common Core State Standards for Writing and Language (CCSS-WL) and Common Core Aligned Assessments for Writing and Language (CCAA-WL) were associated with their sense of efficacy for teaching. Teachers who exhibited strong self-efficacy beliefs for teaching tended to hold favorable perceptions of the CCSS-WL and viewed them as feasible to implement with effort. This alignment with state standards was viewed as supportive of students in achieving satisfactory academic outcomes. The survey suggested that teachers who possess a positive self-perception of their efficacy as educators and are adequately prepared to teach writing are more likely to perceive state standards as a means to achieve improved student writing outcomes rather than a barrier hindering their ability to implement effective teaching practices.

Additional scholarly findings suggest that teachers' self-efficacy beliefs for their writing abilities and writing instruction skills are both important indicators of their effectiveness as writing educators. To become efficacious, it is crucial for teachers to develop a solid understanding of writing skills development and possess the capability to effectively implement writing instruction in their classrooms (Grossman et al., 2009 ). Teachers who lack confidence in their ability to lead student learning effectively may avoid emphasizing the importance of writing to their students and may not allocate sufficient time for writing instruction (Tschannen-Moran and Hoy, 2001 ), which can have negative effects on their students' writing skills and motivation. Consequently, it is essential for teachers to develop their own writing skills and have confidence in their capacity to teach writing to their students.

3.2. Teacher professional development and writing expertise

Efficient writing instruction necessitates competent teachers with a strong knowledge base, skills, and strategies in writing. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of literature on teachers' writing knowledge, and one approach to evaluate their teaching writing knowledge is to examine their training programs (Lembke et al., 2021 ). According to a national report by Yoon et al. ( 2007 ), professional development can positively affect student achievement by first influencing teacher knowledge and skills, which subsequently serves as a mediator, leading to higher student achievement. The report also reveals a moderate-to-strong effect size of 0.53 on reading and writing performance, underlining that effective professional development training or workshops can significantly impact student achievement in these academic areas. Hence, it is essential to evaluate the extent to which teachers have received and internalized such trainings while assessing the impact of professional development efforts on student writing achievement.

Previous research has established that professional development programs that address both beliefs and practices enable teachers to shape their pedagogies and translate their beliefs into effective teaching behaviors (Doubet and Southall, 2017 ). In a randomized controlled trial conducted by Myhill et al. ( 2013 ), 32 teachers from different schools were assessed on their grammar knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge through an achievement test and interview. It was found that teachers with extensive knowledge of grammar were better equipped to enhance learning outcomes and assist their students in developing metalinguistic comprehension of written discourse. On the other hand, teachers with limited grammar knowledge may encounter challenges in handling grammatical discussions, especially when confronted with students' inquiries, and could potentially overlook opportunities to rectify misunderstandings related to grammar usage.

3.3. Writing instruction actions

The implementation of effective instructional practices is paramount to minimizing the discrepancies between anticipated and actual student achievement outcomes (Guskey, 1982 ). However, the quality and quantity of writing instruction provided to K-12 students often falls short (Cutler and Graham, 2008 ). Graham ( 2019 ) identified four major indicators of insufficient writing instruction, including inadequate time allocated for teaching writing, particularly for unfamiliar writing tasks, infrequent opportunities for students to engage in writing activities, limited utilization of evidence-based writing instruction, and insufficient access to digital tools to support students' writing needs. Addressing these shortcomings requires a concerted effort, including teachers' commitment to enhance their expertise and attitudes, as well as radical changes in curriculum standards and associated instructional materials within the educational system. Although mitigating these inadequacies can be daunting, analyzing the interconnections between student- and instructional-level variables may yield meaningful implications for educational practitioners seeking to facilitate student writing outcomes.

Numerous experimental research and synthesis studies (e.g., Graham and Perin, 2007 ; Graham et al., 2012 ) have demonstrated that writing instruction can enhance text quality and quantity, and also spark students' creativity and interest in writing tasks, as long as specific components are incorporated. One key component is the process-oriented approach to teaching writing, which involves explicit instruction of various practices such as planning and revising writing components, peer conferencing for providing and receiving feedback on writing, sharing writing ideas with classmates, monitoring writing progress, selecting one's writing topics, working at one's own pace, and using invented spellings (Pritchard and Honeycutt, 2006 ; Cutler and Graham, 2008 ). According to a meta-analysis study by Graham and Sandmel ( 2011 ), process-focused writing instruction produced a statistically significant but modest increase in the overall quality of writing, as evidenced by an average weighted effect size of 0.34. Despite some studies reporting low effect sizes for certain writing processes and activities (e.g., traditional grammar instruction), the process approach to writing instruction remains a valuable albeit moderately influential strategy for teaching writing to students in general education classrooms.

Effective writing instruction can also be achieved through the use of appropriate teaching materials. Ciullo and Reutebuch ( 2013 ) found that interventions using technology-based graphic organizers or concept maps had a relatively high effect size of 0.80 in improving writing outcomes. By providing students with a structured method for planning and organizing their ideas, graphic organizers can enhance both the quantity and quality of their text output. Similarly, digital writing environments offer an immersive and interactive experience for students, leading to an increase in students' motivation, quantity and quality of writing, use of the writing process, and writing skills (Yamaç et al., 2020 ). Word processors are one such tool with digital environments, and they have been shown to be effective in improving writing length, quality, development and organization of text, mechanical correctness, and motivation to write (Morphy and Graham, 2012 ). These programs allow for easy revision and produce legible characters while providing additional learning supports such as speech recognition and spellcheck. Incorporating rubric-based feedback has also been observed to lead to higher levels of self-efficacy for elementary-aged students in writing class (Hier and Mahony, 2018 ).

Effective instruction in writing is also evident in both its teaching content and methods. An essential component involves incorporating instructional practices that encompass transcription, grammar, vocabulary, text structures, and general global features. These practices are crucial for improving students' overall writing quality and productivity. Specifically, in the early and middle elementary grades, it is imperative to prioritize the teaching of these basic composing writing skills as they establish a solid foundation for advancing writing abilities (Graham et al., 2012 ). Kim et al. ( 2021 ) meta-analysis study provides evidence that focusing on the basic mechanics and conventions of writing has a moderate and positive effect (ES = 0.31) on writing outcomes for primary-grade students (Kindergarten to Grade 3). This effect is particularly pronounced among students with weak writing skills compared to those with typical writing skills. Pedagogically, teachers can model the writing process and exemplify the desired products through the utilization of various material supports, such as writing notebooks, graphic organizers, checklists, and rubrics. Moreover, teachers can foster student engagement through questioning, offering suggestions, and facilitating summarization activities. These approaches contribute to enhancing students' writing proficiency and their understanding of effective strategies (Troia et al., 2011 ). In a study conducted by Graham and Perin ( 2007 ), explicit teaching interventions, such as summarization, were found to have a significant positive effect on writing outcomes, with an effect size of 0.82.

Effective writing instruction is also reliant upon successful classroom management and organizational skills. Elementary school teachers who possess these skills are more likely to have actively engaged students in their classrooms (Clunies-Ross et al., 2008 ; Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2015 ), leading to increased participation, greater persistence, and fewer behavioral issues (Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2009 ). Additionally, classroom management methods that provide clarity and consistency in class regulations have been shown to enhance student interest and emotional engagement in writing (Kunter et al., 2007 ; Hochweber et al., 2014 ). By incorporating these strategies into writing instruction, teachers can optimize student learning and academic achievements.

4. Interplay between student- and teacher-level predictors

Several studies have investigated the variability of students' writing achievement at different levels, including the student, class, school, and broader state levels. Most of these investigations have utilized multilevel modeling to account for the variance within the nested structure of the educational data, allowing them to examine the effects of various factors and their interactions that contribute to explaining achievement disparities between classes. For example, Olinghouse ( 2008 ) investigated the impact of student- and instructional-level factors on the variability of narrative writing fluency and quality. The study revealed that students with low word reading ability could benefit from intensive spelling and grammar instruction to access acquired advanced planning skills, along with an increase in writing instructional time to enhance their genre and topical background knowledge. In a similar vein, Ritchey et al. ( 2015 ) explored the relationship between teachers' orientations and writing instructional practices, which varied by grade level, with older students producing superior texts and their teachers adjusting their instructional foci according to their students' developing competencies. Additionally, Coker et al. ( 2018 ) examined the connections between generative writing instruction and student achievement, which were found to vary based on two student factors (i.e., ethnicity and gender). Specifically, male and minority group students displayed higher writing quality than their counterparts when exposed to increasingly generative writing practices. Taken together, these studies provide critical implications for educators and researchers, emphasizing the need to address the ways in which student variables interact with influential teacher variables to facilitate student learning and construct classroom contexts.

5. Research objectives for this study

Although prior research has shed light on the factors that influence student writing achievement, there remain gaps in our understanding of how these factors interact and influence student writing outcomes. Specifically, exploring the interplay between student motivational beliefs, teacher professional traits, teacher instructional practices, and student writing achievement holds promise to inform the development of effective interventions that promote and sustain writing development. This study aims to expand on previous research by examining the relationships among these variables in upper elementary students using hierarchical linear modeling. The proposed conceptual model is presented in Figure 1 . The study addresses the following research questions and corresponding hypotheses as follows:

The proposed conceptual model among variables for the multilevel analysis.

• Research Question 1: Does students' writing motivation predict their writing quality?
• Hypothesis 1: Students' writing motivation relates to their writing quality. More specifically, we posited that the composite motivational scores of students, encompassing self-efficacy beliefs, task interest and value, and outcome and efficacy expectations, would exert a positive influence on their writing performance.
• Research Question 2: Do teachers' professional traits and teaching effectiveness predict students' writing quality?
• Hypothesis 2a: Teachers' self-efficacy beliefs, writing knowledge, writing ability, and professional development efforts relate to students' writing quality.
• Hypothesis 2b: Teachers' instructional practices related to process, skills, materials, teaching tactics, and classroom management relate to students' writing quality.
• Research Question 3: Does the relationship between students' writing motivation and their writing quality depend on teachers' instructional practices?
• Hypothesis 3: Teachers' instructional practices related to process, skills, materials, teaching tactics, and classroom management moderate the relation between students' writing motivation and writing quality.

6.1. Participants and setting

The present study is a subset of a larger research project that aimed to evaluate changes in students' writing motivation, knowledge, and performance over a school year, disaggregated by genres at multiple levels of analysis, including district, classroom, teacher, and student levels (see Troia et al., 2020 ). The sample data analyzed in this study were obtained from 41 English language arts teachers from 18 suburban districts in the Midwestern United States. A total of 346 students were selected based on their writing ability levels, as determined by either their district writing assessment scores or their teacher's ratings of the quality of their beginning-of-year writing samples evaluated using a common rubric in the district. Students varied between low, average, and high writing performance based on this information. The dataset was organized using a two-level stratified cluster sampling design, with students as the first level and teacher/classroom as the second level. As such, the findings from this study can be generalized to similar populations, as the sample included a diverse range of writing ability levels.

6.2. Student instruments

6.2.1. demographics.

At the beginning of each school year, the participating teachers provided students' sociodemographic information, including their grade level, gender, race/ethnicity, and disability status through a survey. When data collection began, the students self-identified their gender and race/ethnicity on a participant information form. Of the 346 students, 46.5% ( n = 161) were fourth graders, 55.5% ( n = 192) were female, 72.0% ( n = 249) were White, and 7.8% ( n = 27) were students who received special education services.

6.2.2. Writing motivational scale

The Situated Writing Activity and Motivation Scale (SWAMS) is a self-report tool used to measure students' motivation levels across three writing genres: narrative, informative, and persuasive. Based on an earlier version developed by Troia et al. ( 2013 ), the SWAMS consists of 15 Likert-scale items rated on a 7-point scale (ranging from 0 representing strongly disagree to 6 representing strongly agree ) for each genre that measure three common motivational constructs of writing: self-efficacy beliefs, task interest and value, and outcome and efficacy expectations. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed to determine the factorial structure of the motivational instrument. The results revealed that a single motivation factor using all 15 items was sufficient to represent writing motivation in each genre, with good internal consistency reliabilities (Cronbach's α ranged from 0.85 to 0.87). The model also exhibited good fitness, as evidenced by CFI = 0.97 and RMSEA = 0.073. Furthermore, significant correlations have been observed between the motivation for narrative, informative, and persuasive writing (see Troia et al., 2022 ; Table 2 ), indicating strong associations ranging from 0.89 to 0.90. Therefore, to represent students' overall level of writing motivational beliefs across three genres, a composite score was computed in this study by averaging the three genre-specific writing motivation scores.

6.2.3. Writing quality

Over the course of the academic year, students were required to complete four writing tasks for each of the three genres: narrative, opinion, and informative. These tasks were administered through an online writing assessment tool (see Truckenmiller et al., 2020 ), with each genre containing four distinct prompts that were presented in a counterbalanced order. To assess the quality of the students' typewritten responses, two trained research assistants utilized an analytic trait scoring rubric based on the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium writing rubrics (Troia et al., 2020 ). The raters evaluated the quality based on seven dimensions, including orienting the reader to the purpose of the text, grouping ideas to enhance text coherence, providing a concluding sentence or section, linking ideas using transition words and phrases, developing ideas with facts, examples, experiences, and descriptive details, using varied and appropriate language and vocabulary, and using correct grammar, usage, and mechanics. Each dimension was double scored on a scale of 0 to 5, resulting in a total score ranging between 0 and 35. To ensure interrater reliability, a two-way random effects intraclass correlation with absolute agreement was calculated, yielding coefficients of 0.80, 0.81, and 0.84 (Troia et al., 2022 ). Similar to the findings regarding writing motivation, our study revealed statistically significant correlations among the writing quality of three distinct genres (see Troia et al., 2022 ; Table 2 ), demonstrating correlation coefficients ranging from 0.81 to 0.85. These results indicate moderate to strong associations between three assessed writing qualities. In order to determine overall writing quality, a composite score was calculated by taking the average score of all essays completed by each student.

6.3. Teacher instruments

6.3.1. demographics.

The study involved 41 teachers who taught fourth and fifth grade English language arts classes. The majority of the participating teachers were female (95.1%) and White (92.7%), but the sample also comprised two African American teachers and one Asian American teacher. Of the 41 participating teachers, 10 (24.6%) held only a bachelor's degree, and 20 (48.8%) taught fourth grade classes. On average, the teachers were 41.59 years old (SD = 1.45, range = 26–61). They had an average of 15.01 years of teaching experience and reported an average of 6.64 years of teaching fourth or fifth grade writing classes, depending on the grade level they were currently teaching when data collection was conducted.

6.3.2. Self-efficacy beliefs

The Teacher Efficacy for Writing Scale (TEWS) is a self-report instrument originally developed by Graham et al. ( 2001 ). In the present study, the scale was modified by excluding eight items related to assessing teachers' general teaching efficacy factor, as these items exhibited low internal consistency reliability. The TEWS utilized in this study is composed of eight questionnaire items that assess teachers' perceived competence in teaching writing, using a six-point scale that ranges from strongly disagree to strongly agree (total scores ranging from 8 to 48; Cronbach's α = 0.84, CFI = 0.92). A higher mean score across items indicates greater teacher efficacy. The TEWS questionnaire items pertain to asking teachers' abilities to implement effective strategies for teaching writing, enhance student retention of introduced concepts, teach writing concepts and skills for rapid mastery, assist students with their most challenging writing problems, adjust the difficulty of writing assignments for struggling students, accurately assess the reasons for a student's writing difficulties, provide appropriate accommodations, and manage disruptive behaviors during writing time. Overall, the TEWS serves as a valuable means of gauging teachers' perceptions of their writing instruction efficacy. The average score of the eight items was used in this study to represent teachers' self-efficacy beliefs.

6.3.3. Writing knowledge

The Teaching Writing Knowledge Test (TWKT) is an assessment tool aimed to measure teachers' writing content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. TWKT encompasses a total of 32 questionnaire items with 116 unique multiple-choice or fill-in responses scored as correct or incorrect (total score ranging from 0 to 116). The test includes items from research-based spelling and grammar knowledge tests for teachers (e.g., Cajkler and Hislam, 2002 ; Myhill et al., 2013 ), as well as items from other available tests used to evaluate pedagogical content knowledge of teachers (e.g., Cambridge English Teaching Knowledge Test). The TWKT also incorporated original items developed by the researchers. The test evaluates teachers' knowledge of key writing concepts such as morphemes, phonemes, syllables, consonant and vowel digraphs, consonant blends, root words, derivational and inflectional suffixes, regular and irregular spelling patterns, parts of speech, sentence structure, writing mechanics (capitalization, punctuation, and spelling), genre traits, evidence-based writing instruction practices, and targeted instructional activities to address various aspects of writing. The instrument has an internal consistency reliability of 0.72.

6.3.4. Writing ability

The participating teachers were asked to undertake two subtests of the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Second edition (WIAT-II; Wechsler, 2005 ) at the beginning of the school year. These subtests, which evaluated the teachers' spelling and written expression skills, yielded standardized age-based scores as measures of writing proficiency. As one of our primary outcome variables at the teacher-level, a composite score was derived by tallying the standardized scores of the two subtests to represent teachers' overall proficiency in writing.

6.3.5. Professional development

A researcher-designed questionnaire of three items is used to assess the nature of teachers' pre-service and in-service professional development (PD) opportunities related to teaching writing. The first item asks about the number of pre-service courses that included information on writing instruction, with response options ranging from 0 (none) to 2 (two or more) or those that were fully devoted to writing instruction, with response options ranging from 3 (one) to 4 (two or more). The second item focuses on the number of in-service activities related to writing instruction that teachers had participated in over the prior 5 years, which included live or online workshops, as well as formal or informal coaching/mentoring activities, with options ranging from 0 (none) to 4 (more than 6). The third item aims to capture the extent of teachers' unique independent learning activities to improve their writing instruction skills, such as engaging in more writing, reading about effective writing instruction, observing other teachers' writing instruction, seeking feedback on their writing instruction, and participating in additional courses or workshops not part of preservice or in-service training. The response options for this item ranged from 0 to 5. The total score for the questionnaire ranged from 0 to 13.

6.3.6. Instructional practices observation

Over the course of the academic year, beginning in October/November and ending in April/May, the writing classes of the participating teachers were observed typically four times. It is worth noting that unforeseen disruptions, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, occasionally impeded the researchers' attempts to maintain a consistent interval between observation points. The observers received extensive training in project meetings before conducting the observations and employed a time-sampling procedure to document the occurrence of assigned instructional practices within each 10-min interval. To record the instructional practices, the two observers used iSeeNCode (Hofstetter, 2016 ), an iPad application with 131 binary codes (0 = absent, 1 = present) derived from the Observation Protocol for Writing Assessment and Instruction (OPWAI). The OPWAI was subdivided into eight major observation dimensions: (1) grouping, (2) process feature focus, (3) genre focus, (4) product feature focus, (5) materials, (6) instructional tactics, (7) management tactics, and (8) assessment. The present study places a particular emphasis on five dimensions of writing instruction, including process feature focus, product feature focus, materials, instructional tactics, and management tactics. To represent each dimensional code, the average proportion of relevant codes to the total number of observation codes (131) per observation segment was calculated across all observations. A higher value for each dimensional code indicates that teachers exhibited a greater frequency of taking actions related to that particular dimension during their observed classes. This approach allows for a quantitative assessment of the extent to which teachers implemented instructional practices related to the five dimensions of writing instruction examined. The components and subcomponents that were encompassed within the five dimensions, along with the interobserver agreement reliability statistics for each dimension, are displayed in the Supplemental material .

6.4. Data analysis strategy

Our study utilized a multilevel structure dataset comprised of 346 students nested within 41 classrooms. This hierarchical structure implies that a student's learning outcome is influenced by both their individual characteristics and the broader class environment. Since simple regression is not suited for analyzing nested data due to the assumption of independence among observations, we employed hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) as our major statistical approach. HLM allows for the accommodation of the nested structure and parameter estimation of the effects of predictors at different levels simultaneously. Given the large sample size within clusters in our case, we also employed the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method for accurate parameter estimation on fixed and random effects (Maas and Hox, 2005 ). Due to the sensitivity of HLM to missing data at level 2 or above, we removed 2 instances of missing data at the teacher level, resulting in a final sample of 41 eligible teachers. All HLM analyses were conducted using lmer package in R Studio 2023.03.0.

During the exploratory phase of our study, we used descriptive and correlational analyses to determine potential covariates and gain preliminary insights into our data characteristics prior to model estimation. However, we acknowledge the limitations of solely relying on correlational analyses as they were indicative of interdependence rather than causality and did not account for correlations across multiple levels. Thus, in the subsequent stages of our study, we adopted HLM analyses to uncover the distinct main and interaction effects of the study measures across different levels.

The present study employed a linear two-level HLM model with MLE method to explore the complexity of the outcome variable of student writing quality. The analytical procedure involved four major steps. Firstly, a null model with no independent variables at both student and teacher levels was executed to assess the proportion of variance in student writing quality that can be attributed to differences between classrooms in addition to the magnitude of variance within classrooms. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was computed to summarize the proportion of total variance in student writing achievement that is attributable to differences between classrooms. If the ICC value is >0.058, the differences across groups cannot be neglected and should be explained using more complex models (Cohen, 1988 ).

Secondly, a level 1 model was employed by incorporating student-level variables, including writing motivation as the principal student-level predictor, along with four relevant covariates (i.e., gender, grade, race/ethnicity, special education status). The level 1 model was designed to examine the effects of student-level predictors on student writing quality.

Thirdly, a level 2 model incorporating teacher-level variables was fitted to test the effects of these variables on student writing quality while accounting for the effects of teacher covariates. The teacher-level variables were categorized into two dimensions. The first dimension consisted of personal and professional attributes of a given teacher, including self-efficacy, writing knowledge, writing ability, and professional development score. The second dimension pertained to teacher instructional effectiveness, focusing on process features, product features, materials, teaching tactics, and class management. By controlling for two demographic covariates, namely gender and educational attainment (i.e., degree), the level 2 model analysis aimed to unpack the unique contribution of teacher-level factors to student writing quality.

Finally, a full model was conducted to examine the cross-level moderator effect. Specifically, the interaction terms between instructional actions at the teacher level and writing motivation at the student level were of primary interest in this study, while six covariates at both student and teacher levels were also included in the full model to control for their potential influence. To ensure accurate and unbiased estimates of the relationship between variables in our HLM, we utilized a strategy of centering variables. Specifically, all student-level variables were centered on the grand mean, while all teacher-level variables were centered on the group mean. This adjustment allowed for easier interpretation of the fixed effect of the level 1 predictor, improved the convergence of the model, and helped to avoid issues of multicollinearity in models with interaction terms. This approach is supported by prior research (Raudenbush and Bryk, 2002 ; Hayes, 2006 ) and is a common practice in hierarchical linear modeling.

The full model can be mathematically presented as follows:

r ij = random effect for student i in classroom j ;

u oj = random effect for classroom j .

HLM models can be evaluated using multiple criteria. The model fit comparison analyses were conducted using one-way ANOVA. The Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) are commonly used fit indices, where lower values indicate superior model fit. The deviance statistic is another measure of fit for the covariance components of a model, which is calculated as −2 times the log likelihood function. Lower deviance values indicate a better model fit. Additionally, the difference in deviance statistics between two nested models can be used to test the hypothesis of whether additional predictors can improve model fit (Jayetileke, 2021 ). The difference in statistics follows a chi-square distribution, with degrees of freedom equaling the difference in the number of estimated parameters in the covariance component of the two models (Davison et al., 2002 ). These criteria are essential in evaluating the adequacy of HLM models and ensuring that the model accurately captures the relationship between variables.

7.1. Exploratory data analysis

Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the student and teacher measures. Tables 2 , ​ ,3 3 present unadjusted bivariate correlations for within-group (student) and for between-group (teacher) measures, respectively. At the student level, student demographic variables, including gender, grade, race/ethnicity, and disability status, were significantly correlated with their writing motivation and quality. Specifically, the positive and moderately strong correlation ( r = 0.362, p < 0.01) between grade and paper quality suggested that moving from the grade 4 category to grade 5 category was moderately associated with an increase in quality, Gender was also found to have a positive but relatively low magnitude association ( r = 0.117, p < 0.05) with paper quality, suggesting that moving from the male category to female category was associated with an increase in paper quality. Race/ethnicity showed a negative correlation ( r = −0.117, p < 0.05) with writing motivation, indicating that moving from White category to non-White category was associated with a decrease in writing motivation. Disability status was found to be significantly associated with both motivation ( r = −0.177, p < 0.01) and quality ( r = −0.291, p < 0.05), suggesting that students with disabilities tended to demonstrate lower writing motivation and paper quality than typically achieving students. Therefore, these demographic variables were incorporated as covariates in subsequent HLM analyses.

Descriptive statistics and coding for the student and teacher measures included in the model.

Bivariate correlations for within-group (student) measures.

Spearman/point-biserial correlation coefficient for categorical variables 1–4 and Pearson correlation coefficient for continuous variables 5–6.

** p < 0.01.

* p < 0.05.

Bivariate correlations for between-group (teacher) measures.

Spearman/point-biserial correlation coefficient for categorical variables 1–2 and Pearson correlation coefficient for continuous variables 3–9.

At the teacher level, teachers' gender and degree information displayed significant associations with other teacher variables. For instance, the weakly positive correlation ( r = 0.121, p < 0.05) between gender and teacher writing knowledge indicates that moving from the female category to male category weakly corresponds with an increase in their writing knowledge, or higher writing knowledge tends to co-occur with the male category. In addition, the weakly positive correlation ( r = 0.109, p < 0.05) between degree and teacher efficacy implies that moving from teachers with bachelor's degrees to teachers with master's degrees was weakly associated with an increase in their teaching efficacy beliefs, or higher efficacy beliefs tend to co-occur with teachers with a master's degree. This finding is consistent with other studies (e.g., Yilmaz and Çokluk-Bökeoglu, 2008 ; Orakci and Karagöz, 2023 ) suggesting that as teachers' level of education progresses, they are likely to develop a more profound comprehension of writing, which may enhance their efficacy beliefs regarding their own writing skills and their effectiveness in teaching writing. Hence, the effects of teacher's gender and degree variables were controlled in the subsequent analyses.

7.2. Unconditional model

To estimate the extent to which writing achievement varied at the student and teacher levels, we initiated our HLM analysis by conducting a one-way random-effects ANOVA model, also referred to as an unconditional model, and included the dependent variable of writing quality as the sole factor. The intercept was found to be significant at 13.66, t (38) = 36.59, p < 0.001, representing the overall average score of writing quality without any predictors in the model. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was 0.24, indicating that a considerable proportion (i.e., 24%) of the variance in student writing quality could be attributed to differences between classrooms, whereas most of the variance was due to differences between students. As our ICC was above the conventional threshold (i.e., 0.058; Cohen, 1988 ), further analyses were required to explain the variance related to differences between teachers and students. The ICC result also revealed the nested data structure of this study, making HLM an appropriate approach for examining our data. Furthermore, Figure 2 displays students' writing motivation and quality scores within each class, reinforcing the nested nature of the data and the necessity for multilevel modeling analysis. The varying slopes depicted in Figure 2 indicate that the factors contributing to the variability between classrooms needs to be explained in the subsequent models. The HLM results are given in Table 4 .

Student writing motivation, quality scores, and their relational slopes disaggregated by teacher/classroom. Each box in the figure represents a unique teacher ID ( n = 41).

Results from HLM predicting student writing quality scores.

* p < 0.10.

** p < 0.05.

*** p < 0.01.

7.3. Level 1 model: student-level

The level 1 model was employed to investigate the associations between students' writing motivational beliefs and writing quality while holding the four covariates constant. Results from the level 1 model supported our proposed Hypothesis 1 that student writing motivation had a positive effect on their writing quality, with a one-scale point increase in writing motivation resulting in a 1.61-point increase in writing quality. Moreover, the results revealed that students who were in fifth grade, female, and typically achieving had significantly better writing performance than their counterparts.

Incorporating student-level predictors into the model accounted for ~32% of the between-class variance in writing quality, while the estimated within-class variance decreased from 0.24 in the unconditional model to 0.14 in the student-level model. The reduction in within-class variance suggested that the addition of student-level predictors was not able to account for a significant portion of the within-group variability in writing achievement, and/or there may be other unmeasured factors that were influencing writing achievement at the student level. Furthermore, based on the model fit comparison (see Table 4 ), the resulting level 1 model demonstrated a significantly better goodness of fit [χ 2 (5) = 121.96, p < 0.001] than the unconditional model, indicating that the integration of student-level predictors significantly improved the model's ability to explain the variance in writing quality.

7.4. Level 2 model: teacher-level

The level 2 model was utilized to further explore the factors that influence student writing achievement by adding teacher-level predictors based on personal and professional attributes, as well as instructional actions. After controlling for two demographic covariates (namely gender and degree), our analysis revealed that, while teacher personal and professional characteristics did not significantly affect student writing quality, there were some notable effects observed between teacher instruction and student writing performance. Specifically, the use of effective teaching tactics, such as modeling, explanation, summarizing, and questioning, had a positive impact (γ = 0.66, p < 0.10) on student writing quality, while the frequent use of class management strategies had a negative effect (γ = −0.74, p < 0.10). Our findings highlighted the importance of effective teaching practices in shaping student writing quality. Effective teaching strategies, such as giving clear writing directions, facilitating discussions about writing-related issues, and using questioning techniques to gauge understanding, can enhance student writing performance. Conversely, instructional strategies that aim to monitor, support, alter, or control student writing behaviors may impede student writing achievement to some extent.

It is important to acknowledge that we applied a less stringent criterion for significance testing (i.e., p < 0.10) to interpret the results. The decision was made with the aim of increasing the likelihood of detecting interaction effects that hold theoretical importance while mitigating the risk of overfitting, which can arise when including too many variables in a model with a limited sample size (Scherbaum and Ferreter, 2009 ). Moreover, a significance level of 0.10 also was utilized to interpret the interaction results in the subsequent analyses. It is crucial to recognize that this approach introduces a limitation to the study.

By incorporating the main effects of teacher-level predictors, our level 2 model demonstrated an improved capability to account for 40% of the between-class variance in student writing achievement, resulting in a decrease in the estimated within-class variance by 0.08. Comparing the level 2 model to the level 1 model, level 2 model exhibited a better goodness of fit, as evidenced by its decreased deviation value of 1775.4 and a higher fit statistic [χ 2 (11) = 18.754, p = 0.06]. These findings suggest that the level 2 model is more effective in predicting data and provides a more accurate representation of the factors that impact student writing achievement.

7.5. Full model: moderating effect of teacher's instructional practices

Finally, a full model with multiple cross-level interaction terms was used to examine the joint effects of students' motivational beliefs and teachers' writing instructional practices on writing achievement. The findings showed that, at the student-level, gender, grade, and disability status remained significant predictors of writing quality, whereas the main effect of student motivational beliefs was no longer significant. However, we indeed found that student motivational beliefs had weak but significant interaction effects when combined with other writing instructional practices variables. This suggested that the effect of student writing motivation may be modified by other variables with which it interacted in a more complex model, such as teachers' implementation of certain writing instructional practices.

The findings indicated that the interaction term between student motivation and teacher instruction on process features was marginally significant and negative (γ = −1.27, p < 0.1), indicating that the relationship between student motivational beliefs and their writing achievement was moderated by the frequency of teacher instruction on process features. Specifically, the negative effect of student motivation on their writing achievement was found to be marginally significantly stronger when teacher instruction on process features was more frequent, compared to when it was less frequent. The observed decrease in the scale of the effect was weakened by a value of 1.27 units.

The interaction term of motivation × materials was also marginally significant and negative (γ = −0.60, p < 0.1), suggesting that the relationship between student motivational beliefs and their writing achievement was moderated by the more frequent use of materials in writing class. Specifically, the negative impact of student motivation on their writing achievement was found to be marginally significantly stronger when the frequency of utilizing materials in the writing class was higher compared to when it was lower. The observed decrease in the scale of the effect was weakened by a value of 0.60 units.

Conversely, the interaction term between student motivation and the frequency of utilizing teaching tactics in the writing class was marginally significant and positive (γ = 0.59, p < 0.1), indicating that the relationship between student motivational beliefs on writing and their writing achievement was moderated by the frequency of employing teaching tactics in the writing class. Specifically, the positive effect of student motivation on their writing achievement was found to be more evident when there was increased frequency of utilizing teaching tactics in the writing class compared to when it was lower. The observed increment in the scale of the effect was increased by a value of 0.59 units.

The full model, which included five pairs of interaction terms, did not significantly improve the fit of the model compared to the level 2 model, as indicated by the ANOVA chi-square test χ 2 (5) = 8.066, p = 0.15. In other words, the difference in fit between the level 2 model and full model is not statistically significant. While this non-significant result may suggest issues with statistical power or small sample size, it is important to note that the additional predictors in the full model may still be important and meaningful in explaining the outcome variable. It is noteworthy that the full model showed a slightly lower capability in explaining between-class variance in student writing achievement compared to the level 2 model, with a decrease of 2%. However, the full model demonstrated an increase of 6% in its predictive ability for explaining variance in writing achievement within classrooms.

7.6. Summary of results

The results of bivariate correlational analyses and level 1 model, as presented in Tables 2 – 4 , revealed that all student-level variables, except race/ethnicity, were significantly related to student writing achievement. However, only two teacher variables, namely teaching tactics and class management, exhibited significant effects on writing achievement but with different directional impacts, as demonstrated by the level 2 model results. The HLM analysis revealed that writing motivation had a positive predictive effect on writing achievement, as evident from significant results in both student- and teacher-level models.

Despite student motivation being non-significant in the final HLM analysis, our study identified significant interaction effects between motivational beliefs and instructional practices on writing achievement. Specifically, our findings suggested that students with high motivation were more likely to demonstrate better writing outcomes in a classroom setting where writing instruction emphasized fewer process features and materials but utilized more teaching tactics, compared to classrooms with the opposite characteristics. Table 5 provides a summary of the results our proposed hypotheses.

Summary of hypotheses.

8. Discussion and implications

Within the academic domain of writing, state content standards exert significant influence on guiding content and pedagogical approaches adopted by educators (Troia and Graham, 2016 ; Baez-Hernandez, 2019 ). Despite concerted efforts to incorporate a diverse array of writing task types and increase writing time across the curriculum, the impact of these standards on classroom instruction and subsequent writing outcomes may be curtailed due to the inadequate quantity and quality of writing practices provided throughout the United States (Graham et al., 2012 ). Additionally, the significant variability among teachers in terms of their experiences, values, beliefs, and attitudes toward writing proficiency and instruction poses a formidable challenge in implementing coordinated and effective writing instructional practices across diverse classrooms (Perry, 1998 ). This complexity necessitates a multifaceted approach when attempting to teach writing effectively and efficiently. Therefore, the aim of this study was to shed light on instructional practices and professional traits associated with writing that can promote students' motivation and performance. Our findings suggest an interrelated and integrated array of teachers' professional traits and instructional actions that can influence students' writing motivation and proficiency. Moreover, we observed that certain instructional practices targeting different aspects of developing students' writing performance can moderate the predictive power between students' writing motivation and their writing quality. Our findings not only validate students' writing strengths and weaknesses at the individual level, but also offer valuable insights for educators on implementing effective practices at the teacher level.

8.1. Student-level predictors of writing achievement

The outcomes of the student-level analysis indicated a significant association between students' motivational beliefs and their writing achievement, regardless of student demographics. Specifically, students who displayed a strong inclination toward writing, assigned value to producing multiple written products, and demonstrated confidence in their writing ability, tended to outperform in writing tasks compared to those who felt overwhelmed, frustrated, and lacked motivation toward writing. These findings were consistent with earlier research studies on writing motivation and achievement conducted by Pajares ( 2003 ), Graham et al. ( 2007 ), and Wilson and Trainin ( 2007 ), which also provided evidence of a significant positive correlation between writing motivation and achievement.

Furthermore, we explored the impact of students' sociodemographic characteristics on their writing achievement. Our analysis revealed that female students, fifth graders, and typically achieving students tended to produce higher quality writing than their male, fourth grade, and struggling counterparts. These findings aligned with prior research suggesting that gender (De Smedt et al., 2018 ), grade level (Shell et al., 1995 ), and learning ability (Troia and Graham, 2016 ) may have an impact on writing achievement, and should therefore be considered when designing writing instruction for elementary-aged children. Although the underlying reasons for these findings are not entirely evident, it is anticipated that girls, older students, and typically achieving students may have a more accurate understanding of their writing abilities, possess more advanced writing skills and strategies, set clearer goals for the writing process and product, and develop a theory of mind to understand their audience (Graham and Perin, 2007 ). Hence, students with these demographic characteristics are likely to develop into more advanced and sophisticated writers. Our results reinforce the notion that student motivational beliefs are malleable and can be influenced by various factors such as cultural background, personal interests, prior experience, and other individual traits (Pajares, 2003 ).

When examining the impact of student-level variables on writing achievement between classrooms, our study revealed that these factors accounted for a relatively lower proportion of the variance (i.e., 32%) compared to similar studies that employed multilevel analysis methods (e.g., Coker et al., 2018 ; Los and Schweinle, 2019 ) to explain writing outcomes. It is important to note that our study did not place primary emphasis on student-level factors, nor did we include other writing-related skills that have been found to significantly impact writing achievement, such as handwriting fluency, basic reading ability, and spelling, as was done in Coker et al.'s ( 2018 ) study. Future research could incorporate other student-related factors, such as writing knowledge and strategies, to capture a more comprehensive range of individual differences that may contribute to writing achievement.

The findings of our student-level analysis hold important implications for both preservice and in-service educators seeking to provide effective writing instruction for elementary-aged children. Firstly, along with considering the content and structure of the writing curriculum to benefit their students, it is also essential to consider individual student-level factors and tailor their instruction to meet the specific needs of each student to boost their motivation and writing achievement. To achieve this, educators should adopt a student-centered approach that acknowledges the social and cultural diversity of students' backgrounds and their unique motivational beliefs (see Land et al., 2012 ). Professional development opportunities should also be provided to educators to enhance their understanding of student motivation and effective writing instruction, particularly for students who are struggling or disengaged. By leveraging students' individual strengths and interests, educators can create a respectful, supportive, and engaging writing environment that fosters motivation and facilitates writing achievement for all students (Tucker, 2012 ).

Additionally, educators should consider providing targeted writing instruction and support for struggling students, including those who lack motivation or confidence in their writing ability, to help them overcome writing challenges and achieve writing success. This finding was also consistent with a prior study (Troia et al., 2022 ) that classified the same sample of students used here into five distinct written profiles, where motivation was identified as a critical writing-related measure that distinguished their profiles and further affected their writing quality in narrative, persuasive, and informative essays. To address the needs of unmotivated writers, instructional scaffolds with motivational elements, including self-regulatory activities to maintain motivation and individualize treatment (Zimmerman and Bandura, 1994 ) may be beneficial to keep students motivated and prevent them from falling behind.

8.2. Teacher-level predictors of writing achievement

While individual differences among students are undoubtedly significant contributors to the complexity of their writing achievement, it is essential not to overlook the impact of teacher/classroom-level factors in explaining the variance in writing achievement between classrooms. Our analysis revealed that teacher-level predictors significantly accounted for an additional 8% of the variance in explaining writing achievement beyond student-level factors.

In our study, we examined two dimensions of teacher-level factors. The first dimension of teacher-level factors was investigated, specifically the quantity of teaching practices across varied aspects of instruction. Our analyses revealed that teaching tactics were positively associated with student writing achievement, whereas class management was adversely related to student writing achievement. However, we did not observe any statistically significant impact on student writing achievement for other aspects of teacher actions. These findings suggest that the positive effect of teaching tactics on student writing achievement may be attributed to their ability to create a supportive and engaging learning environment through modeling, questioning, suggestions, feedback, and so forth, which can enhance student motivation and confidence in writing (Kapka and Oberman, 2001 ; Tienken and Achilles, 2003 ). On the other hand, excessive class management practices can disrupt student learning and negatively impact their motivation to write (Franklin and Harrington, 2019 ). Regarding the non-significant effects, it is possible that these effects were confounded by other factors. To explore this possibility further, we conducted a moderating analysis and found that some of the other teaching aspects had a significant impact on student writing achievement when motivation served as a moderator. The interacting relationships are discussed in a subsequent section.

Another domain involved investigating the impact of teachers' personal and professional traits on student writing achievement. However, we did not find any statistically significant effects of teacher degree, gender, efficacy beliefs, writing knowledge, writing ability, or professional development on student writing achievement. There are various reasons that could explain these findings. Firstly, our result was consistent with prior research that proved no significant relationship between teacher qualifications and student academic achievement (Huang and Moon, 2009 ; Kosgei et al., 2013 ). Secondly, the measures used to assess teacher-level factors in this study may not have been sensitive or specific enough to capture the nuances of these constructs. For example, self-efficacy beliefs are multifaceted and intricate constructions, and a narrow or insufficient measure may not be able to capture the full range of nuances in this construct. Similarly, for writing knowledge, we only analyzed teachers' writing ability in spelling and written expression using a standardized test (the WIAT-II), thereby neglecting the complex nature of this construct. Thirdly, it is also possible that teacher-level factors interact with other contextual factors; therefore, the effect of teacher-level factors may be masked or moderated by other factors. Hence, future study should investigate these contextual factors to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay between teacher-level factors and student writing achievement.

Our analysis of teacher-level factors has important implications. While we did not observe significant associations between teachers' personal and professional characteristics and student writing achievement, this does not necessarily imply that teachers should not strive to develop their own expertise and ability for teaching writing. Instead, we propose integrating these factors into a school district's accountability system can provide valuable empirical insights into the multifaceted process of teacher evaluation (see Kupermintz, 2003 ). Although it may be challenging to define the hallmarks of effective teachers, effective instructional practices can be identified and honed. When data on teacher effectiveness are coupled with professional development opportunities that concentrate on improving instructional characteristics and teaching behaviors, the ultimate result can be improved educational success for the majority of students (Stronge, 2006 ).

8.3. Moderating role of teachers' instructional effectiveness between student motivation and achievement

Our study has revealed three interaction effects at a significance level of 0.10. First, the interaction term of motivation × process was found to have negative impact on student writing achievement. This finding implies that, in classes where writing instruction on process features was infrequent, student motivation had a strong predictive effect on their writing achievement. It also can be interpreted that for students with lower writing motivation, providing writing instruction focused on process features was found to have a stronger predictive effect on their writing achievement; conversely, for students with higher writing motivation, such instruction may not provide as much benefit in facilitating their performance. 1 This finding is in line with the notion that process-oriented instruction involves providing direct strategy instruction and scaffolded practice that integrates a set of theories, procedures, and activities into multiple writing processes such as planning, drafting, and revising. Previous research has suggested that such guided instruction can be effective in boosting writing performance and can be particularly beneficial for demotivated students (e.g., Collins, 1998 ; Lamb, 2017 ). Additionally, the literature also indicates that more experienced and mature writers typically use writing processes to compose essays, implying that motivated writers may have the capability to leverage their own self-regulation and may not derive as much benefit from guided instruction (e.g., Graham and Harris, 1996 ; Cleary and Zimmerman, 2004 ).

The second significant interaction effect we observed was between motivation and the utilization of writing materials during classes, which had a negative impact on student writing achievement. This suggests that in classes where writing materials such as graphic organizers, revision checklists, and word walls were infrequently utilized, student motivation had a strong predictive power on their writing achievement. In other words, for students with lower writing motivation, utilizing materials was found to have a stronger predictive effect on their writing achievement, whereas such teaching practices may not greatly profit students with higher writing motivation. This aligns with prior research that providing optimal learning materials can be engaging for unmotivated students and can provide additional support for their writing development with an effect size of 0.82 (see Graham and Perin, 2007 ).

Third, the interaction term of motivation × teaching tactics was found to positively influence student writing achievement. The result indicates that in writing classes where teaching tactics such as modeling, explanation, questioning, and conferencing/discussion were frequently employed, student motivation had a strong predictive effect on their writing achievement. Specifically, for students with high writing motivation, these instructional tactics were found to have a stronger predictive effect on their writing achievement, while for students with lower writing motivation, providing such instruction may not be as beneficial for facilitating their achievement. Effective and adequate teaching tactics can contribute to a positive learning environment and promote student engagement, ultimately leading to better academic performance. Our findings are consistent with previous research suggesting that teachers can establish positive relationships with the students and enhance their writing performance by providing varied instructional assistance, including modeling, demonstration, and discussion, as well as offering positive feedback and reinforcement for the use of writing strategies, and granting students more autonomy in selecting their writing topics (Troia et al., 2012 ; Bruning and Kauffman, 2016 ; Philippakos, 2020 ). Additionally, the finding that low-motivated students may not gain as much from teaching tactics is likely due to their lack of intrinsic drive and interest, which can hinder their ability to remain attentive and receptive during teacher-led instruction. To address this issue, educators may opt for incorporating instructional models such as the self-regulated strategy development approach, which involves teacher modeling followed by independent student practice and hands-on activities that have been demonstrated to promote creativity and boost student engagement (Harris et al., 2008 ). This approach provides opportunities for students to take an active role in their learning and apply concepts and strategies in meaningful and interactive ways, because relying solely on modeling and explaining strategies may prove inadequate for many students (Harris and Graham, 1999 ). It is also noted that the frequency of class management has a negative impact on student writing achievement in the full model, although this was not an interaction effect. Excessive classroom management activities may impede the time allocated for writing activities and disrupt teachers' planned instruction, leading to a shift in focus away from writing instruction (Marzano et al., 2003 ). In addition, the frequent use of punitive management strategies during class may decrease students' motivation to learn (Rahimi and Karkami, 2015 ). Previous research has shown that effective writing classes typically encounter disruptive behavior incidents approximately once every 2 h, while ineffective classes may experience such incidents as frequently as every 12 min (Stronge et al., 2007 ). It is crucial to maintain a balanced approach to class management that does not detract from writing instruction and avoids frequent disruptions that can interfere with students' learning.

9. Conclusions

Different from prior studies that relied on bivariate correlations or simple regression analyses to explore relationships, the present study addresses a major gap in the literature on cross-level effects by utilizing multilevel analysis within our nested dataset. We aimed to investigate how students with varying levels of motivation may benefit from specific teaching strategies to enhance their writing achievement. Future studies could expand upon our work by incorporating additional student-level predictors, which would allow for targeted instruction based on individual student characteristics. It is also important to acknowledge that our study primarily relied on quantitative observation data to examine the presence or absence of specific writing instructional actions employed by teachers in their writing class, rather than delving into the intricates of their implementation. For instance, we found a negative moderating effect of teaching materials on students' writing achievement. However, it is essential to recognize that simply providing students with tools or resources without adequate guidance may not positively moderate the relationship between motivation and performance. Conversely, if students are provided with the same tools along with the knowledge and skills to effectively utilize these materials, it might yield a positive moderating effect on the relationship between motivation and performance. Future research utilizing qualitative methods can offer a more nuanced exploration of the utilization of these instructional actions, allowing for a richer understanding of their effects on students' writing performance.

Although we did not find any significant effects of teacher personal or professional characteristics on student writing achievement, it is arbitrary to suggest that these factors are not important. In fact, teacher efficacy beliefs and writing expertise can enhance their effectiveness as both writers and educators, and may ultimately influence their instructional efficiency and promote a positive learning environment. Furthermore, our study emphasizes the importance of caution when implementing teaching tactics, given that students with varying levels of motivation may exhibit different levels of response to these instructional approaches. This finding has significant implications for educational practitioners, as it suggests the need for differentiated instruction that caters to the unique needs and characteristics of each student, to ensure that all students are engaged and motivated to learn.

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Social Science Behavioral/Education Institutional Review Board, Michigan State University. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants' legal guardian/next of kin.

Author contributions

Conceptualization: HW and GT. Methodology, formal analysis, and writing—original draft preparation: HW. Writing—review and editing, project administration, and funding acquisition: GT. All authors have read and agreed to the submit the manuscript.

Funding Statement

This research was supported in part by grant #R305A160049 from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, to Michigan State University. Statements do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of this agency, and no official endorsement by it should be inferred.

1 Interaction term indicates a bidirectional relationship. Therefore, we interpreted both directions of the interaction effects, whether motivation was the moderator or instructional practices were the moderator. The same approach for interpretation was taken for other interaction terms in this study. This allowed us to comprehensively explore the relationship between motivation, instructional practices, and writing outcomes.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1213929/full#supplementary-material

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Six Reasons Why Research is Important

Everyone conducts research in some form or another from a young age, whether news, books, or browsing the Internet. Internet users come across thoughts, ideas, or perspectives - the curiosity that drives the desire to explore. However, when research is essential to make practical decisions, the nature of the study alters - it all depends on its application and purpose. For instance, skilled research offered as a  research paper service  has a definite objective, and it is focused and organized. Professional research helps derive inferences and conclusions from solving problems. visit the HB tool services for the amazing research tools that will help to solve your problems regarding the research on any project.

What is the Importance of Research?

The primary goal of the research is to guide action, gather evidence for theories, and contribute to the growth of knowledge in data analysis. This article discusses the importance of research and the multiple reasons why it is beneficial to everyone, not just students and scientists.

On the other hand, research is important in business decision-making because it can assist in making better decisions when combined with their experience and intuition.

Reasons for the Importance of Research

• Acquire Knowledge Effectively
• Research helps in problem-solving
• Provides the latest information
• Builds credibility
• Helps in business success
• Discover and Seize opportunities

1-  Acquire Knowledge Efficiently through Research

The most apparent reason to conduct research is to understand more. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about a subject, there is always more to learn. Research helps you expand on any prior knowledge you have of the subject. The research process creates new opportunities for learning and progress.

2- Research Helps in Problem-solving

Problem-solving can be divided into several components, which require knowledge and analysis, for example,  identification of issues, cause identification,  identifying potential solutions, decision to take action, monitoring and evaluation of activity and outcomes.

You may just require additional knowledge to formulate an informed strategy and make an informed decision. When you know you've gathered reliable data, you'll be a lot more confident in your answer.

3- Research Provides the Latest Information

Research enables you to seek out the most up-to-date facts. There is always new knowledge and discoveries in various sectors, particularly scientific ones. Staying updated keeps you from falling behind and providing inaccurate or incomplete information. You'll be better prepared to discuss a topic and build on ideas if you have the most up-to-date information. With the help of tools and certifications such as CIRS , you may learn internet research skills quickly and easily. Internet research can provide instant, global access to information.

4- Research Builds Credibility

Research provides a solid basis for formulating thoughts and views. You can speak confidently about something you know to be true. It's much more difficult for someone to find flaws in your arguments after you've finished your tasks. In your study, you should prioritize the most reputable sources. Your research should focus on the most reliable sources. You won't be credible if your "research" comprises non-experts' opinions. People are more inclined to pay attention if your research is excellent.

5-  Research Helps in Business Success

R&D might also help you gain a competitive advantage. Finding ways to make things run more smoothly and differentiate a company's products from those of its competitors can help to increase a company's market worth.

6-  Research Discover and Seize Opportunities

People can maximize their potential and achieve their goals through various opportunities provided by research. These include getting jobs, scholarships, educational subsidies, projects, commercial collaboration, and budgeted travel. Research is essential for anyone looking for work or a change of environment. Unemployed people will have a better chance of finding potential employers through job advertisements or agencies. 

How to Improve Your Research Skills

Start with the big picture and work your way down.

It might be hard to figure out where to start when you start researching. There's nothing wrong with a simple internet search to get you started. Online resources like Google and Wikipedia are a great way to get a general idea of a subject, even though they aren't always correct. They usually give a basic overview with a short history and any important points.

Identify Reliable Source

Not every source is reliable, so it's critical that you can tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. To find a reliable source, use your analytical and critical thinking skills and ask yourself the following questions: Is this source consistent with other sources I've discovered? Is the author a subject matter expert? Is there a conflict of interest in the author's point of view on this topic?

Validate Information from Various Sources

Take in new information.

The purpose of research is to find answers to your questions, not back up what you already assume. Only looking for confirmation is a minimal way to research because it forces you to pick and choose what information you get and stops you from getting the most accurate picture of the subject. When you do research, keep an open mind to learn as much as possible.

Facilitates Learning Process

Learning new things and implementing them in daily life can be frustrating. Finding relevant and credible information requires specialized training and web search skills due to the sheer enormity of the Internet and the rapid growth of indexed web pages. On the other hand, short courses and Certifications like CIRS make the research process more accessible. CIRS Certification offers complete knowledge from beginner to expert level. You can become a Certified Professional Researcher and get a high-paying job, but you'll also be much more efficient and skilled at filtering out reliable data. You can learn more about becoming a Certified Professional Researcher.

Stay Organized

You'll see a lot of different material during the process of gathering data, from web pages to PDFs to videos. You must keep all of this information organized in some way so that you don't lose anything or forget to mention something properly. There are many ways to keep your research project organized, but here are a few of the most common:  Learning Management Software , Bookmarks in your browser, index cards, and a bibliography that you can add to as you go are all excellent tools for writing.

Make Use of the library's Resources

If you still have questions about researching, don't worry—even if you're not a student performing academic or course-related research, there are many resources available to assist you. Many high school and university libraries, in reality, provide resources not only for staff and students but also for the general public. Look for research guidelines or access to specific databases on the library's website. Association of Internet Research Specialists enjoys sharing informational content such as research-related articles , research papers , specialized search engines list compiled from various sources, and contributions from our members and in-house experts.

of Conducting Research

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5 Brain-Based Reasons to Teach Handwriting in School

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience support teaching handwriting in school..

Posted September 15, 2016 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• Some schools in the United States have stopped teaching manuscript at certain grade levels, which is a mistake.
• Brain scanning has demonstrated that handwriting in manuscript helps preschoolers learn their letters.
• Research has shown that learning to write in cursive improves spelling and composing skills.

Teaching handwriting in elementary school is getting huge support from research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience . Some state legislatures are paying attention and mandating that handwriting be put back in the elementary school curriculum. That’s smart: Handwriting helps support children’s literacy and academic development. Here’s what the research now says regarding both “why” and “how” to teach it.

Why? #1. Handwriting helps kids develop reading circuitry in their brains.

If we want kids to learn to read, we should teach handwriting beginning in preschool. Brain scanning has demonstrated that handwriting in manuscript helps preschoolers learn their letters (James & Englehardt, 2012). In doing so the child who is learning to print letters is setting up the neural systems that underlie reading. How? By connecting several reading and handwriting distinct shared neural systems or networks in the human brain (James & Englehardt, 2012). Think of writing by hand as being indispensable for helping children develop a brain that reads with proficiency. That’s why schools that have thrown out teaching handwriting should bring it back.

Why? #2. Handwriting makes better writers and spellers and predicts reading and academic success.

The handwriting is on the wall. Research shows that learning to write by hand is a key component in improving both spelling ability and written composition. With beginners, handwriting experience facilitates letter learning (James, 2010; Longcamp et al., 2005), and letter learning not only sets up the neural systems that underlie reading, writing, and spelling but it is a primary predictor of later reading success (James & Engelhardt, 2012; Piasta & Wagner, 2010). In addition, handwriting fluency frees the child’s mind for more complex composing skills for making meaning (Dinehart, 2015). Much of the current handwriting research demonstrates immediate gains and lasting benefits for academic achievement. Even in upper elementary and middle school, research has shown that learning to write in cursive improved spelling and composing skills (Berninger, 2015). The takeaway? It’s worth taking the time in the daily curriculum and it’s worth the financial investment in teaching resources for handwriting.

Why? #3. Handwriting makes both children—and adults—smarter! Close those laptops!

Learning handwriting in preschool is better than learning letters on the computer because research shows that handwriting in print—not keyboarding—leads to adult-like neural processing in the visual system of the preschool child’s developing reading brain (Stevenson & Just, 2014). In one study, researchers found gray matter volume and density correlating with higher handwriting quality, which signals more efficient neural processing and higher skills and ability (Gimenez et al., 2014). Furthermore, when older students lack fluency in their writing, composition skills suffer along with self-esteem , grades, and test scores (Stevenson & Just, 2014).

Even in adults handwriting is better than keyboarding for learning. Public Radio International’s Marc Sollinger reports Pam Mueller’s notetaking research at Princeton University that led Sollinger to champion handwriting and implore laptop writers to “Close Your Laptops!” and write notes in longhand. Mueller’s notetaking experiments found that typing on a laptop was much less effective for remembering and synthesizing information. Those lecturer-verbatim laptop notes weren’t as good as longhand for studying for the test or for retrieving information because ENCODING in writing—just as with preschoolers and kindergartners—is better for the learning brain than keyboarding.

How? #4. Start out with teacher modeling.

Exemplary veteran kindergarten teachers and researchers Eileen Fledgus, Isabell Cardonick, and I worked for over thirty years synthesizing the research and showing kindergarten and first-grade teachers the benefits of teacher modeling for letter learning and writing. Even if children come to kindergarten classrooms unable to write their own names we have them drawing their story or drawing their information and writing meaningful pieces within a couple of months (Feldgus, Cardonick, & Gentry, in press). Now our techniques are supported by neuroscience and psychological research (see for example Puranik & Alobaita, 2012; Puranik,& Lonigan, 2011; Puranik, Lonigan, & Kim,2011).

How? #5. Teach handwriting directly and explicitly.

Handwriting is a complex skill engaging cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills simultaneously. It is best learned through direct instruction (Beringner, 2015; Berninger et al. 2006; Hanstra-Bletz and Blote, 1993; Maeland, 1992).

Some schools in the United States have stopped teaching manuscript explicitly in kindergarten and first grade and stopped teaching cursive beginning in grade 3 ostensibly due to not having time to teach handwriting in elementary school. That’s a mistake. Handwriting for school children is a boon for reading, writing, and spelling. It’s still required in Great Britain—they are getting it right. It’s supported by research. We should be teaching handwriting (and spelling) in the U.S.

Invest in handwriting instruction, and as I reported in previous posts, invest in explicit spelling instruction. If you are a parent, a principal, a school board member, or an education administrator insist on direct handwriting and spelling instruction throughout primary and elementary school. Both are important stepping stones on the 21st-century pathway to academic success.

Sample References from a Huge Research Base Favoring Handwriting

Berninger, V., Rutberg, J., Abbott, R., Garcia, N., Anderson-Youngstrom, M., Brooks, A., & Fulton, C. (2006). Tier 1 and Tier 2 early intervention for handwriting and composing. Journal of School Psychology , 44, 3-30.

Berninger, V.W. (2015) Position paper submitted June 20, 2015 to Ohio State Legislature entitled Research Report in Support of OH 146.

Dinehart, L. H. (2015). Handwriting in early childhood education: Current research and future implications. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy , 15(1), 97–118.

Feldgus, E., Cardonick, I. & Gentry. R. (in press). Kid Writing in the 21st Century . Los Angeles, CA: Hameray Publishing Group.

Gimenez, P., Bugescu, N., Black, J. M., Hancock, R., Pugh, K., Nagamine, M., Hoeft, F. (2014). Neuroimaging correlates of handwriting quality as children learn to read and write. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , 8(155). doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00155

James, K. H., & Englehardt, L. (2012). The effects of handwriting on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education , 1(1), 32–42.

Puranik, C. S., & Alobaita, S. (2012). Examining the contribution of handwriting and spelling to written expression in kindergarten children. Reading and Writing , 25(7), 1523–1546.

Piasta, S. B., & Wagner, R. K. (2010). Developing early literacy skills: A meta-analysis of alphabet learning and instruction. Reading Research Quarterly , 45(1), 8–38. doi:10.1598/RRQ.45.1.2

Puranik, C. S., & Lonigan, C. J. (2011). From scribbles to Scrabble: Preschool children’s developing knowledge of written language. Reading and Writing , 24(5), 567–589.

Puranik, C. S., Lonigan, C. J., & Kim, Y.-S. (2011). Contributions of emergent literacy skills to name writing, letter writing, and spelling in preschool children. Early Childhood Research Quarterly , 26(4), 465–474.

Stevenson, N. C., & Just, C. (2014). In early education, why teach handwriting before keyboarding? Early Childhood Education Journal , 42, 49–56.

Sollinger, M. (2015). Close your laptop. Handwriting could make you smarter. Public Radio International, Development & Education/Innovation Hub posted July 12, 2015. http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-12/close-your-laptop-handwriting-cou…

Links to posts on the importance of direct spelling instruction:

Connecting Spelling Books to Reading Scores

5 Reasons Your Child’s School Needs Spelling Books—Part 1

Dr. J. Richard Gentry is the author of Spelling Connections for Grade 1 through Grade 8. Follow him on Facebook , Twitter , and LinkedIn and find out more information about his work on his website .

J. Richard Gentry, Ph.D. , is an expert on childhood literacy, reading, and spelling. He is the author of Raising Confident Readers: H ow to Teach Your Child to Read and Write—Baby to Age 7 .

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February 21, 2024

Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning

Engaging the fine motor system to produce letters by hand has positive effects on learning and memory

By Charlotte Hu

Studies continue to show pluses to writing by hand.

Image Source/Getty Images

Handwriting notes in class might seem like an anachronism as smartphones and other digital technology subsume every aspect of learning across schools and universities. But a steady stream of research continues to suggest that taking notes the traditional way—with pen and paper or even stylus and tablet—is still the best way to learn, especially for young children. And now scientists are finally zeroing in on why.

A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology monitored brain activity in students taking notes and found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that has many experts speaking up about the importance of teaching children to handwrite words and draw pictures.

Differences in Brain Activity

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The new research, by Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), builds on a foundational 2014 study . That work suggested that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking, says van der Meer , a professor of neuropsychology at NTNU. “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” she says. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it—prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts .

To understand specific brain activity differences during the two note-taking approaches, the NTNU researchers tweaked the 2014 study’s basic setup. They sewed electrodes into a hairnet with 256 sensors that recorded the brain activity of 36 students as they wrote or typed 15 words from the game Pictionary that were displayed on a screen.

When students wrote the words by hand, the sensors picked up widespread connectivity across many brain regions. Typing, however, led to minimal activity, if any, in the same areas. Handwriting activated connection patterns spanning visual regions, regions that receive and process sensory information and the motor cortex. The latter handles body movement and sensorimotor integration, which helps the brain use environmental inputs to inform a person’s next action.

“When you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing A is entirely different from producing a B,” van der Meer says. She notes that children who have learned to read and write by tapping on a digital tablet “often have difficulty distinguishing letters that look a lot like each other or that are mirror images of each other, like the b and the d.”

Reinforcing Memory and Learning Pathways

Sophia Vinci-Booher , an assistant professor of educational neuroscience at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the new study, says its findings are exciting and consistent with past research. “You can see that in tasks that really lock the motor and sensory systems together, such as in handwriting, there’s this really clear tie between this motor action being accomplished and the visual and conceptual recognition being created,” she says. “As you’re drawing a letter or writing a word, you’re taking this perceptual understanding of something and using your motor system to create it.” That creation is then fed back into the visual system, where it’s processed again—strengthening the connection between an action and the images or words associated with it. It’s similar to imagining something and then creating it: when you materialize something from your imagination (by writing it, drawing it or building it), this reinforces the imagined concept and helps it stick in your memory.

The phenomenon of boosting memory by producing something tangible has been well studied. Previous research has found that when people are asked to write, draw or act out a word that they’re reading, they have to focus more on what they’re doing with the received information. Transferring verbal information to a different form, such as a written format, also involves activating motor programs in the brain to create a specific sequence of hand motions, explains Yadurshana Sivashankar , a cognitive neuroscience graduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who studies movement and memory. But handwriting requires more of the brain’s motor programs than typing. “When you’re writing the word ‘the,’ the actual movements of the hand relate to the structures of the word to some extent,” says Sivashankar, who was not involved in the new study.

For example, participants in a 2021 study by Sivashankar memorized a list of action verbs more accurately if they performed the corresponding action than if they performed an unrelated action or none at all. “Drawing information and enacting information is helpful because you have to think about information and you have to produce something that’s meaningful,” she says. And by transforming the information, you pave and deepen these interconnections across the brain’s vast neural networks, making it “much easier to access that information.”

The Importance of Handwriting Lessons for Kids

Across many contexts, studies have shown that kids appear to learn better when they’re asked to produce letters or other visual items using their fingers and hands in a coordinated way—one that can’t be replicated by clicking a mouse or tapping buttons on a screen or keyboard. Vinci-Booher’s research has also found that the action of handwriting appears to engage different brain regions at different levels than other standard learning experiences, such as reading or observing. Her work has also shown that handwriting improves letter recognition in preschool children, and the effects of learning through writing “last longer than other learning experiences that might engage attention at a similar level,” Vinci-Booher says. Additionally, she thinks it’s possible that engaging the motor system is how children learn how to break “ mirror invariance ” (registering mirror images as identical) and begin to decipher things such as the difference between the lowercase b and p.

Vinci-Booher says the new study opens up bigger questions about the way we learn, such as how brain region connections change over time and when these connections are most important in learning. She and other experts say, however, that the new findings don’t mean technology is a disadvantage in the classroom. Laptops, smartphones and other such devices can be more efficient for writing essays or conducting research and can offer more equitable access to educational resources. Problems occur when people rely on technology too much , Sivashankar says. People are increasingly delegating thought processes to digital devices, an act called “ cognitive offloading ”—using smartphones to remember tasks, taking a photo instead of memorizing information or depending on a GPS to navigate. “It’s helpful, but we think the constant offloading means it’s less work for the brain,” Sivashankar says. “If we’re not actively using these areas, then they are going to deteriorate over time, whether it’s memory or motor skills.”

Van der Meer says some officials in Norway are inching toward implementing completely digital schools . She claims first grade teachers there have told her their incoming students barely know how to hold a pencil now—which suggests they weren’t coloring pictures or assembling puzzles in nursery school. Van der Meer says they’re missing out on opportunities that can help stimulate their growing brains.

“I think there’s a very strong case for engaging children in drawing and handwriting activities, especially in preschool and kindergarten when they’re first learning about letters,” Vinci-Booher says. “There’s something about engaging the fine motor system and production activities that really impacts learning.”

A version of this article entitled “Hands-on” was adapted for inclusion in the May 2024 issue of Scientific American.

The Importance of Developing Writing Skills in Elementary School

When we think about the skills most important to develop in young children, a love of reading and writing are always at the forefront. A child with a book or pencil in her hands is a child with a bright future in front of her.

Reading and writing may be looked at as fundamental skills within the classroom, but their use remains essential long after one’s formal education comes to an end. Living in the digital age has made literacy even more important, as communicating professionally via writing is an important (and assumed!) skill in most workplaces.

At a time when professionals spend one third of their time reading and writing emails , written communication is more important than ever before for success in academics and beyond. The earlier in life writing skills are developed, the stronger these skills will be in the long run, highlighting the importance of writing in elementary school.

Writing Skills and Long Term Academic Success

While there are countless benefits to having strong writing skills, the benefit of teaching students these skills from an early age are mostly on academic success across the curriculum. Study after study suggests that students who are able to master writing skills early on struggle less in overall literacy and communicating .

Increased writing instruction that focuses not merely on penmanship, but on writing strategies, planning, and organization, can benefit students for the rest of their lives. Even prior to this, increased confidence with writing skills can help students to be more effective in communicating their understanding of core curriculum and learning standards, allowing students to better demonstrate their knowledge across the curriculum and to express their concerns and questions in a way to help further their personal understanding. Nadine Rice addresses these issues in her article, “ Meeting the Reading Challenges of Science Textbooks in the Primary Grades ,” where the relationship between student communication skills and course material is explored.

Students who learn to write a complete sentence at a young age are more likely to apply that knowledge and develop that skill into writing complete paragraphs as they age. Mastering writing at an early age is associated with higher outcomes on standardized testing and overall performance in school, as is outlined by the Institute of Educational Sciences 2012 report by the U.S. Department of Education, titled “ Teaching Elementary School Students to be Effective Writers .” This includes starting writing instruction as early as Kindergarten.

Aside from simply helping students to write their letters and learn their name, students at this earliest level of Elementary education ought to be learning how to plan their writing by picking ideas, organizing their notes into a logical sequences, and then being able to take that idea and write it down with detail and elaboration so they can convey their concept via written communication. As students age, the outlining of events, the quality of detail, and eventually the strategies that they use to develop a sentence and convey their ideas should also develop, so that by the time they are graduating and entering the workforce students are able to convey their meaning and ideas competently and accurately to potential employers.

Writing in the Professional World

Working in a professional setting requires strong writing skills. A 2016 study found that 44% of managers feel most recent college graduates entering the workforce lack writing proficiency. With writing skills in such high demand, increased writing instruction and student feedback can benefit students for the rest of their lives.

Taking the stress off of being able to communicate expands a student’s ability to learn and demonstrate their understanding of ideas, and this can help with achievement levels throughout elementary and secondary school and extend well into their professional aptitude. Students who are taught competent writing skills at an early age often reach greater levels of academic success as a result . These benefits pour over into professional skills on a very fundamental level.

Before starting a career, an individual’s writing skills are going to come into play as having a huge role in determining one’s professional abilities. Being able to write a competent resume and cover letter are necessary to gain employment, and communicating with colleagues and clients in a professional setting is also a necessary skill to have.

Regardless of career choice, reading and writing skills are going to factor majorly for a student and help in their career as an adult.. Heightened focus on these skills at the elementary level is essential in ensuring the future success of America’s future leaders.

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• In any way that violates any applicable federal, state, local, or international law or regulation (including, without limitation, any laws regarding the export of data or software to and from the US or other countries).
• For the purpose of exploiting, harming, or attempting to exploit or harm minors in any way by exposing them to inappropriate content, asking for personally identifiable information, or otherwise.
• To send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use, or re-use any material that does not comply with the Content Standards set out in these Terms of Use.
• To transmit, or procure the sending of, any advertising or promotional material, including any “junk mail”, “chain letter”, “spam”, or any other similar solicitation.
• To impersonate or attempt to impersonate the Company, a Company employee, another user, or any other person or entity (including, without limitation, by using email addresses or screen names associated with any of the foregoing).
• To engage in any other conduct that restricts or inhibits anyone’s use or enjoyment of the Website, or which, as determined by us, may harm the Company or users of the Website or expose them to liability.

Additionally, you agree not to:

• Use the Website in any manner that could disable, overburden, damage, or impair the site or interfere with any other party’s use of the Website, including their ability to engage in real time activities through the Website.
• Use any robot, spider, or other automatic device, process, or means to access the Website for any purpose, including monitoring or copying any of the material on the Website.
• Use any manual process to monitor or copy any of the material on the Website or for any other unauthorized purpose without our prior written consent.
• Use any device, software, or routine that interferes with the proper working of the Website.
• Introduce any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, logic bombs, or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful.
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to, interfere with, damage, or disrupt any parts of the Website, the server on which the Website is stored, or any server, computer, or database connected to the Website.
• Attack the Website via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of-service attack.
• Otherwise attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Website.

If you use, or assist another person in using the Website in any unauthorized way, you agree that you will pay us an additional $50 per hour for any time we spend to investigate and correct such use, plus any third party costs of investigation we incur (with a minimum $300 charge). You agree that we may charge any credit card number provided for your account for such amounts. You further agree that you will not dispute such a charge and that we retain the right to collect any additional actual costs.

User Contributions

The Website may contain message boards, chat rooms, personal web pages or profiles, forums, bulletin boards, and other interactive features (collectively, “ Interactive Services “) that allow users to post, submit, publish, display, or transmit to other users or other persons (hereinafter, “ post “) content or materials (collectively, “ User Contributions “) on or through the Website.

All User Contributions must comply with the Content Standards set out in these Terms of Use.

Any User Contribution you post to the site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary. By providing any User Contribution on the Website, you grant us and our affiliates and service providers, and each of their and our respective licensees, successors, and assigns the right to use, reproduce, modify, perform, display, distribute, and otherwise disclose to third parties any such material for any purpose.

You represent and warrant that:

• You own or control all rights in and to the User Contributions and have the right to grant the license granted above to us and our affiliates and service providers, and each of their and our respective licensees, successors, and assigns.
• All of your User Contributions do and will comply with these Terms of Use.

You understand and acknowledge that you are responsible for any User Contributions you submit or contribute, and you, not the Company, have full responsibility for such content, including its legality, reliability, accuracy, and appropriateness.

For any academic source materials such as textbooks and workbooks which you submit to us in connection with our online tutoring services, you represent and warrant that you are entitled to upload such materials under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law. In addition, if you request that our system display a representation of a page or problem from a textbook or workbook, you represent and warrant that you are in proper legal possession of such textbook or workbook and that your instruction to our system to display a page or problem from your textbook or workbook is made for the sole purpose of facilitating your tutoring session, as “fair use” under copyright law.

You agree that we may record all or any part of any live online classes and tutoring sessions (including voice chat communications) for quality control and other purposes. You agree that we own all transcripts and recordings of such sessions and that these Terms of Use will be deemed an irrevocable assignment of rights in all such transcripts and recordings to us.

We are not responsible or liable to any third party for the content or accuracy of any User Contributions posted by you or any other user of the Website.

Monitoring and Enforcement: Termination

We have the right to:

• Remove or refuse to post any User Contributions for any or no reason in our sole discretion.
• Take any action with respect to any User Contribution that we deem necessary or appropriate in our sole discretion, including if we believe that such User Contribution violates the Terms of Use, including the Content Standards, infringes any intellectual property right or other right of any person or entity, threatens the personal safety of users of the Website or the public, or could create liability for the Company.
• Disclose your identity or other information about you to any third party who claims that material posted by you violates their rights, including their intellectual property rights or their right to privacy.
• Take appropriate legal action, including without limitation, referral to law enforcement, for any illegal or unauthorized use of the Website.
• Terminate or suspend your access to all or part of the Website for any or no reason, including without limitation, any violation of these Terms of Use.

Without limiting the foregoing, we have the right to cooperate fully with any law enforcement authorities or court order requesting or directing us to disclose the identity or other information of anyone posting any materials on or through the Website. YOU WAIVE AND HOLD HARMLESS THE COMPANY AND ITS AFFILIATES, LICENSEES, AND SERVICE PROVIDERS FROM ANY CLAIMS RESULTING FROM ANY ACTION TAKEN BY ANY OF THE FOREGOING PARTIES DURING, OR TAKEN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF, INVESTIGATIONS BY EITHER SUCH PARTIES OR LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES.

However, we do not undertake to review material before it is posted on the Website, and cannot ensure prompt removal of objectionable material after it has been posted. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any action or inaction regarding transmissions, communications, or content provided by any user or third party. We have no liability or responsibility to anyone for performance or nonperformance of the activities described in this section.

Content Standards

These content standards apply to any and all User Contributions and use of Interactive Services. User Contributions must in their entirety comply with all applicable federal, state, local, and international laws and regulations. Without limiting the foregoing, User Contributions must not:

• Contain any material that is defamatory, obscene, indecent, abusive, offensive, harassing, violent, hateful, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable.
• Promote sexually explicit or pornographic material, violence, or discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age.
• Infringe any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, or other intellectual property or other rights of any other person.
• Violate the legal rights (including the rights of publicity and privacy) of others or contain any material that could give rise to any civil or criminal liability under applicable laws or regulations or that otherwise may be in conflict with these Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy .
• Be likely to deceive any person.
• Promote any illegal activity, or advocate, promote, or assist any unlawful act.
• Cause annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety or be likely to upset, embarrass, alarm, or annoy any other person.
• Impersonate any person, or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with any person or organization.
• Involve commercial activities or sales, such as contests, sweepstakes, and other sales promotions, barter, or advertising.
• Give the impression that they emanate from or are endorsed by us or any other person or entity, if this is not the case.

(collectively, the “ Content Standards ”)

Copyright Infringement

If you believe that any User Contributions violate your copyright, please contact us  and provide the following information:

• An electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest;
• A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed;
• A description of where the material you claim is infringing is located on the website (and such description must reasonably sufficient to enable us to find the alleged infringing material);
• Your address, telephone number and email address;
• A written statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
• A statement by you, made under the penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf.

We may terminate the accounts of any infringers.

Reliance on Information Posted

From time to time, we may make third party opinions, advice, statements, offers, or other third party information or content available on the Website or from tutors under tutoring services (collectively, “Third Party Content”). All Third Party Content is the responsibility of the respective authors thereof and should not necessarily be relied upon. Such third party authors are solely responsible for such content. WE DO NOT (I) GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS OR USEFULNESS OF ANY THIRD PARTY CONTENT ON THE SITE OR ANY VERIFICATION SERVICES DONE ON OUR TUTORS OR INSTRUCTORS, OR (II) ADOPT, ENDORSE OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR RELIABILITY OF ANY OPINION, ADVICE, OR STATEMENT MADE BY ANY TUTOR OR INSTRUCTOR OR ANY PARTY THAT APPEARS ON THE WEBSITE. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL WE BE RESPONSBILE OR LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE RESULTING FROM YOUR RELIANCE ON INFORMATION OR OTHER CONENT POSTED ON OR AVAILBLE FROM THE WEBSITE.

Changes to the Website

We may update the content on this Website from time to time, but its content is not necessarily complete or up-to-date. Any of the material on the Website may be out of date at any given time, and we are under no obligation to update such material.

Information About You and Your Visits to the Website

All information we collect on this Website is subject to our Privacy Policy . By using the Website, you consent to all actions taken by us with respect to your information in compliance with the Privacy Policy.

Online Purchases and Other Terms and Conditions

All purchases through our site or other transactions for the sale of services and information formed through the Website or resulting from visits made by you are governed by our Terms of Sale, which are hereby incorporated into these Terms of Use.

Additional terms and conditions may also apply to specific portions, services, or features of the Website. All such additional terms and conditions are hereby incorporated by this reference into these Terms of Use.

Linking to the Website and Social Media Features

You may link to our homepage, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it, but you must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval, or endorsement on our part without our express written consent.

This Website may provide certain social media features that enable you to:

• Link from your own or certain third-party websites to certain content on this Website.
• Send emails or other communications with certain content, or links to certain content, on this Website.
• Cause limited portions of content on this Website to be displayed or appear to be displayed on your own or certain third-party websites.

You may use these features solely as they are provided by us, and solely with respect to the content they are displayed with and otherwise in accordance with any additional terms and conditions we provide with respect to such features. Subject to the foregoing, you must not:

• Establish a link from any website that is not owned by you.
• Cause the Website or portions of it to be displayed on, or appear to be displayed by, any other site, for example, framing, deep linking, or in-line linking.
• Link to any part of the Website other than the homepage.
• Otherwise take any action with respect to the materials on this Website that is inconsistent with any other provision of these Terms of Use.

The website from which you are linking, or on which you make certain content accessible, must comply in all respects with the Content Standards set out in these Terms of Use.

You agree to cooperate with us in causing any unauthorized framing or linking immediately to stop. We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.

We may disable all or any social media features and any links at any time without notice in our discretion.

Links from the Website

If the Website contains links to other sites and resources provided by third parties (“ Linked Sites ”), these links are provided for your convenience only. This includes links contained in advertisements, including banner advertisements and sponsored links. You acknowledge and agree that we have no control over the contents, products, services, advertising or other materials which may be provided by or through those Linked sites or resources, and accept no responsibility for them or for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them. If you decide to access any of the third-party websites linked to this Website, you do so entirely at your own risk and subject to the terms and conditions of use for such websites.

You agree that if you include a link from any other website to the Website, such link will open in a new browser window and will link to the full version of an HTML formatted page of this Website. You are not permitted to link directly to any image hosted on the Website or our products or services, such as using an “in-line” linking method to cause the image hosted by us to be displayed on another website. You agree not to download or use images hosted on this Website or another website, for any purpose, including, without limitation, posting such images on another website. You agree not to link from any other website to this Website in any manner such that the Website, or any page of the Website, is “framed,” surrounded or obfuscated by any third party content, materials or branding. We reserve all of our rights under the law to insist that any link to the Website be discontinued, and to revoke your right to link to the Website from any other website at any time upon written notice to you.

Geographic Restrictions

The owner of the Website is based in the state of New Jersey in the United States. We provide this Website for use only by persons located in the United States. We make no claims that the Website or any of its content is accessible or appropriate outside of the United States. Access to the Website may not be legal by certain persons or in certain countries. If you access the Website from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with local laws.

Disclaimer of Warranties

You understand that we cannot and do not guarantee or warrant that files available for downloading from the internet or the Website will be free of viruses or other destructive code. You are responsible for implementing sufficient procedures and checkpoints to satisfy your particular requirements for anti-virus protection and accuracy of data input and output, and for maintaining a means external to our site for any reconstruction of any lost data. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PROVIDED BY LAW, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE CAUSED BY A DISTRIBUTED DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACK, VIRUSES, OR OTHER TECHNOLOGICALLY HARMFUL MATERIAL THAT MAY INFECT YOUR COMPUTER EQUIPMENT, COMPUTER PROGRAMS, DATA, OR OTHER PROPRIETARY MATERIAL DUE TO YOUR USE OF THE WEBSITE OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE OR TO YOUR DOWNLOADING OF ANY MATERIAL POSTED ON IT, OR ON ANY WEBSITE LINKED TO IT.

YOUR USE OF THE WEBSITE, ITS CONTENT, AND ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. THE WEBSITE, ITS CONTENT, AND ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. NEITHER THE COMPANY NOR ANY PERSON ASSOCIATED WITH THE COMPANY MAKES ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION WITH RESPECT TO THE COMPLETENESS, SECURITY, RELIABILITY, QUALITY, ACCURACY, OR AVAILABILITY OF THE WEBSITE. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, NEITHER THE COMPANY NOR ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH THE COMPANY REPRESENTS OR WARRANTS THAT THE WEBSITE, ITS CONTENT, OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE WILL BE ACCURATE, RELIABLE, ERROR-FREE, OR UNINTERRUPTED, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, THAT OUR SITE OR THE SERVER THAT MAKES IT AVAILABLE ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS, OR THAT THE WEBSITE OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEBSITE WILL OTHERWISE MEET YOUR NEEDS OR EXPECTATIONS.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PROVIDED BY LAW, THE COMPANY HEREBY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS FOR PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

THE FOREGOING DOES NOT AFFECT ANY WARRANTIES THAT CANNOT BE EXCLUDED OR LIMITED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

Limitation on Liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PROVIDED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL THE COMPANY, ITS AFFILIATES, OR THEIR LICENSORS, SERVICE PROVIDERS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OFFICERS, OR DIRECTORS BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, UNDER ANY LEGAL THEORY, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR USE, OR INABILITY TO USE, THE WEBSITE, ANY WEBSITES LINKED TO IT, ANY CONTENT ON THE WEBSITE OR SUCH OTHER WEBSITES, INCLUDING ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PERSONAL INJURY, PAIN AND SUFFERING, EMOTIONAL DISTRESS, LOSS OF REVENUE, LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, LOSS OF USE, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF DATA, AND WHETHER CAUSED BY TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), BREACH OF CONTRACT, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF FORESEEABLE.

THE FOREGOING DOES NOT AFFECT ANY LIABILITY THAT CANNOT BE EXCLUDED OR LIMITED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Company, its affiliates, licensors, and service providers, and its and their respective officers, directors, employees, contractors, agents, licensors, suppliers, successors, and assigns from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, judgments, awards, losses, costs, expenses, or fees (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or relating to your violation of these Terms of Use or your use of the Website, including, but not limited to, your User Contributions, any use of the Website’s content, services, and products other than as expressly authorized in these Terms of Use or your use of any information obtained from the Website.

Governing Law and Jurisdiction

All matters relating to the Website and these Terms of Use and any dispute or claim arising therefrom or related thereto (in each case, including non-contractual disputes or claims), shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the internal laws of the State of New Jersey without giving effect to any choice or conflict of law provision or rule (whether of the State of New Jersey or any other jurisdiction).

Any legal suit, action, or proceeding arising out of, or related to, these Terms of Use or the Website shall be instituted exclusively in the federal courts of the United States or the courts of the State of New Jersey in each case located in the County of Monmouth although we retain the right to bring any suit, action, or proceeding against you for breach of these Terms of Use in your country of residence or any other relevant country. You waive any and all objections to the exercise of jurisdiction over you by such courts and to venue in such courts. You may not under any circumstances commence or maintain against us any class action, class arbitration, or other representative action or proceeding.

Arbitration

By using this Website, you agree, at Company’s sole discretion, that it may require you to submit any disputes arising from the use of these Terms of Use or the Website, including disputes arising from or concerning their interpretation, violation, invalidity, non-performance, or termination, to final and binding arbitration under the Rules of Arbitration of the American Arbitration Association applying New Jersey law. In doing so, YOU GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO COURT to assert or defend any claims between you and us. YOU ALSO GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION OR OTHER CLASS PROCEEDING. Your rights may be determined by a NEUTRAL ARBITRATOR, NOT A JUDGE OR JURY. You are entitled to a fair hearing before the arbitrator. The arbitrator can grant any relief that a court can, but you should note that arbitration proceedings are usually simpler and more streamlined than trials and other judicial proceedings. Decisions by the arbitrator are enforceable in court and may be overturned by a court only for very limited reasons.

Any proceeding to enforce this arbitration provision, including any proceeding to confirm, modify, or vacate an arbitration award, may be commenced in any court of competent jurisdiction. In the event that this arbitration provision is for any reason held to be unenforceable, any litigation against Company must be commenced only in the federal or state courts located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. You hereby irrevocably consent to the jurisdiction of those courts for such purposes.

Limitation on Time to File Claims

ANY CAUSE OF ACTION OR CLAIM YOU MAY HAVE ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OF USE OR THE WEBSITE MUST BE COMMENCED WITHIN ONE (1) YEAR AFTER THE CAUSE OF ACTION ACCRUES, OTHERWISE, SUCH CAUSE OF ACTION OR CLAIM IS PERMANENTLY BARRED.

Waiver and Severability

No waiver by the Company of any term or condition set out in these Terms of Use shall be deemed a further or continuing waiver of such term or condition or a waiver of any other term or condition, and any failure of the Company to assert a right or provision under these Terms of Use shall not constitute a waiver of such right or provision.

If any provision of these Terms of Use is held by a court or other tribunal of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable for any reason, such provision shall be eliminated or limited to the minimum extent such that the remaining provisions of the Terms of Use will continue in full force and effect.

Entire Agreement

The Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy, and Terms of Sale constitute the sole and entire agreement between you and Marco Learning LLC regarding the Website and supersede all prior and contemporaneous understandings, agreements, representations, and warranties, both written and oral, regarding the Website.

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Action research on the teaching of writing in primary schools

Related Papers

Reading and Writing

susan ledger

Pambas Tandika

The task of developing pupils in their early stages of schooling with good writing skills in early years tends to be accorded low priority by educators and researchers despite the fact writing is an essential skill useful both in school and in future socio-economic activities. Therefore this study is important to be undertaken to reveal specific strategies employed and challenges faced by teachers in developing pupils in standard One and Two with writing competency in public schools in the sampled areas. The data were collected from classroom teachers through semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires. The data analysis was done through grounded content analysis involving coding to establish outspoken issues of the study and it was revealed that pupils’ acquisition of writing competency was highly dependent on the teacher’s commitment and readiness. The study further revealed that the pupil’s commitments to practicing writing, ability to handle and use pen/pencil, and ...

Julie Dockrell

Graham Frater

Abenelu Adah

ABSTRACT Writing has been a matter of concern to teachers and students especially at the primary school level. This project therefore attempts to discuss what writing is, the writing skills the methods of guided composition to enable the pupils write effectively. The project also used three methodologies and data presentation for the study. Also, the project highlights that limited number of qualified English teachers, insufficient textbooks; instructional materials coupled with the period allocated to writing are the causes of poor performance in teaching and learning of writing. The project recommends that pupils should pay more attention to their teachers and they should utilize the writing materials available to them. And workshops should be organized for teachers of English Language in the aspect of composition, to create awareness on the techniques needed for teaching it.

Tazanfal Tehseem

This paper reports on the result of a case study, aiming to investigate the teaching of writing in a grade 5 Australian primary classroom. The paper will report data from three sources: classroom observations over six weeks, in which the researcher acted as a non participant observer, samples of students’ texts and an interview with the teacher at the end of the process of data collection. Data from the classroom observations, samples of students’ texts and the interview indicate that the teaching of writing in this class could be considered eclectic. Despite a strong emphasis on the implementation of the process approach, the teaching practices also drew on the systemic functional linguistic genre pedagogy (the SFL GP).

English in Education

Professor Andrew Lambirth

Teachers&#x27; perceptions of their changing practice in the context of the National Literacy Strategy have been well documented in recent years. However, few studies have collected pupils&#x27; views or voices. As part of a collaborative research and development project into the teaching and learning of writing, 390 primary pupils&#x27; views were collected. A marked difference in attitude to writing and self-esteem as writers was found between Key Stages 1 and 2, as well as a degree of indifference and disengagement from in-school writing for some KS2 writers. A strong desire for choice and greater autonomy as writers was expressed and a preference for narrative emerged. This part of the research project ‘We&#x27;re Writers&#x27; has underlined the importance of listening to pupils’ views about literacy, in order to create a more open dialogue about language and learning, and to negotiate the content of the curriculum in response to their perspectives.

Mary Goulter

Steve Graham

A random sample of primary grade teachers (N 178; 97 % female) from across the United States was surveyed about their classroom instructional practices in writing. Most of the participating teachers (72%) took an eclectic approach to writing instruction, combining elements from the 2 most common methods for teaching writing: process writing and skills instruction. Although 90 % of the teachers reported using most of the writing instructional practices that were included in the survey, there was considerable variability between teachers in how often they used specific practices. The study provides support for the following 7 recommendations for reforming primary grade writing instruction: (a) increase amount of time students spend writing; (b) increase time spent writing expository text; (c) provide better balance between time spent writing, learning writing strategies, and teaching writing skills; (d) place more emphasis on fostering students ’ motivation for writing; (e) develop st...

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Understanding Science

How science REALLY works...

Prepare and plan

Educational research.

The teaching resources recommended on our site are consistent with what is known about how students learn the nature and process of science. Educational research suggests that the most effective instruction in this area is explicit and reflective, and provides multiple opportunities for students to work with key concepts in different contexts. But just how do we know that this sort of instruction works? And how do we know which concepts are hardest for students to learn and which are the most difficult misconceptions to address? To find out, browse the links below. Each link summarizes a journal article from the education research literature and helps reveal how we know what we know about how students learn.

• “That’s what scientists have to do”: Preservice elementary teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science during a moon investigation.  (Abell et al., 2001)
• Influence of a reflective activity-based approach on elementary teachers’ conceptions of nature of science.  (Akerson et al., 2000)
• Evaluating knowledge of the nature of (whole) science.  (Allchin, 2011)
• Learners’ responses to the demands of conceptual change: Considerations for effective nature of science instruction.  (Clough, 2006)
• Examining students’ views on the nature of science: Results from Korean 6th, 8th, and 10th graders.  (Kang et al., 2004)
• Influence of explicit and reflective versus implicit inquiry-oriented instruction on sixth graders’ views of nature of science.  (Khishfe and Abd-El-Khalick, 2002)
• Teachers’ understanding of the nature of science and classroom practice: Factors that facilitate or impede the relationship.  (Lederman, 1999)
• Revising instruction to teach nature of science.  (Lederman and Lederman, 2004)
• Science teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science: Do they really influence teacher behavior?  (Lederman and Zeidler, 1987)
• Examining student conceptions of the nature of science.  (Moss, 2001)
• Student conceptualizations of the nature of science in response to a socioscientific issue.  (Sadler et al., 2004)
• Explicit reflective nature of science instruction: Evolution, intelligent design, and umbrellaology.  (Scharmann et al., 2005)
• Developing views of nature of science in an authentic context: An explicit approach to bridging the gap between nature of science and scientific inquiry.  (Schwartz et al., 2004)
• Tangled up in views: Beliefs in the nature of science and responses to socioscientific dilemmas.  (Zeidler et al., 2002)

Abell, S., M. Martini, and M. George. 2001. “That’s what scientists have to do”: Preservice elementary teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science during a moon investigation.  International Journal of Science Education  23(11):1095-1109. Two sections of an undergraduate course in elementary science education were observed during an extended investigation, in which students made observations of the moon and tried to develop explanations for what they saw. Students worked in groups, were engaged in many aspects of the process of science, and were asked to reflect on their own learning regarding the moon. Eleven student journals of the experience, along with interview transcripts from these students, were analyzed for student learning regarding observation in science, the role of creativity and inference in science, and social aspects of science. Major findings include:

• Students recognized that observations are key in science but didn’t recognize the role that observation plays in science.
• Students recognized that their own work involved observing, predicting, and coming up with explanations, but they did not generally connect this to the process of science.
• Students recognized that collaboration facilitated their own learning but did not generally connect this to the process of science.

This research highlights the pedagogical importance of making the nature and process of science explicit: even though students were actively engaged in scientific processes, they did not get many of the key messages that the instructors implicitly conveyed. The researchers also recommend asking students to reflect on how their own understandings of the nature and process of science are changing over time.

Akerson, V.L., F. Abd-El-Khalick, and N.G. Lederman. 2000. Influence of a reflective activity-based approach on elementary teachers’ conceptions of nature of science.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching  37(4):295-317. Fifty undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a science teaching methods course engaged in six hours of activities designed to target key nature-of-science concepts, consistent with those outlined in Lederman and Lederman (2004). After the initial set of activities and throughout the course, students were encouraged to reflect on those concepts as opportunities arose within the designated pedagogical content, and were assigned two writing tasks focusing on the nature of science. By the end of the course, students were so accustomed to these reflections that they frequently identified such opportunities for themselves. Students were pre- and post-tested with an open-ended questionnaire targeting the key concepts, and a subset of students was interviewed on these topics. Responses were analyzed for key concepts to determine whether students held adequate conceptions in these areas. Major findings include:

• There were few differences between graduates and undergraduates: most students began the course with largely inadequate conceptions.
• Students began the course understanding least about the empirical nature of science, the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, the difference between theories and laws, and the role of creativity in science.
• Significant gains were achieved as a result of instruction. Student conceptions improved most in the areas of the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, the difference between theories and laws, and the difference between observation and inference.

The explicit, reflective instruction was effective, but despite the gains achieved, many students still held inadequate conceptions at the end of the course. This supports the idea that students hold tenacious misconceptions about the nature and process of science, and, the authors argue, suggests that instructors should additionally focus on helping students see the inadequacy of their current conceptions. The authors suggest that the role of subjectivity, as well as of social and cultural factors, in science are best learned through rich historical case studies, which are hard to fit into a methods course. Finally, the authors conclude that nature-of-science instruction is effective in a methods course, but would likely be more effective in a science content course.

Allchin, D. 2011. Evaluating knowledge of the nature of (whole) science.  Science Education  95:518-542. The author argues that commonly used instruments assessing knowledge of the nature of science are inadequate in several ways. They focus too much on declarative knowledge instead of conceptual understanding, are designed for research not classroom assessment, and are inauthentic in the sense that they do not examine student knowledge in contexts similar to those in which we want students to use this knowledge. Furthermore, lists of the tenets of the nature of science (which such assessments are based upon) are oversimplified and incomplete. The author argues that instead of assessing whether students can list the characteristics of scientific knowledge, we should be interested in whether students can effectively analyze information about scientific and socioscientific controversies and assess the reliability of scientific claims that affect their decision making. In order to do this, students need to understand how the process of science lends credibility to scientific ideas. The author proposes an alternative assessment form (based on the AP free responses essay) that requires well-informed analysis on the part of the student, involves authentic contexts, and can be adapted for many different assessment purposes and situations. In it, students are asked to analyze historic and modern case studies of scientific and socioscientific controversies. Prototypes for this type of assessment are provided.

Clough, M. 2006. Learners’ responses to the demands of conceptual change: Considerations for effective nature of science instruction.  Science Education  15:463-494. The author introduces the idea that many aspects of student learning about the nature and process of science can be explained, and that learning may be improved, by viewing this learning as a process of conceptual change. Just as in learning about Newtonian physics, students often enter an instructional setting with tenacious misconceptions about what science is and how it works — probably resulting from previous instruction (e.g., cookbook labs) and other experiences. Students may then distort new information to fit their existing incorrect knowledge frameworks. The author proposes that this is why explicit, reflective instruction (which provides students with opportunities to assess their previous conceptions) helps students learn about the nature and process of science, while implicit, non-reflective instruction does not. Furthermore, the author argues that explicit instruction on the nature and process of science can be placed along a continuum from decontextualized to highly contextualized. Examples of each are:

• Decontextualized: black-box activities
• Moderately contextualized: students reflecting on the process of science in their own labs
• Highly contextualized: students reflecting on a modern or historic example of science in progress

Highly contextualized activities are useful because they make it difficult for a student to dismiss their learning as applying only to “school science” and because teachers are less likely to view such activities as add-ons. However, decontextualized activities also have advantages because they make it very easy to be explicit and emphasize key concepts. The author concludes that instruction that incorporates instruction from all along the continuum and that draws students’ attention to the connections between the different positions along the continuum is likely to be most effective.

Kang, S., L. Scharmann, and T. Noh. 2004. Examining students’ views on the nature of science: Results from Korean 6th, 8th, and 10th graders.  Science Education  89(2):314-334. A multiple-choice survey (supplemented by open-ended questions) on the nature and process of science was given to a large group of 6th, 8th, and 10th grade students in Korea. Most students thought that:

• Science is mainly concerned with technological advancement
• Theories are proven facts
• Theories can change over time
• Scientific knowledge is not constructed, but discovered (i.e., can be read off of nature)

Interestingly, Korean students don’t tend to hold the common Western misperception of theories as “just hunches.” The researchers found little improvement in understanding in older students. This suggests that special attention is needed to help students learn about the nature of science. The researchers argue that we should begin instruction in this area early in elementary school.

Khishfe, R., and F. Abd-El-Khalick. 2002. Influence of explicit and reflective versus implicit inquiry-oriented instruction on sixth graders’ views of nature of science.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching  39(7):551-578. Two sixth grade classes (62 students total) in Lebanon experienced two different versions of a curriculum spanning ten 50 minute segments. One class participated in an inquiry-oriented science curriculum, which included a discussion component that explicitly emphasized how the nature of science was demonstrated through student activities. The other participated in the same inquiry curriculum, but their discussion focused exclusively on science content or the skills students had used in the activity. Both groups completed open-ended questionnaires and participated in interviews regarding their views of the nature of science before and after the intervention. The two groups started off with similar, low levels of understanding, but the students in the class with explicit discussion of the nature of science substantially improved their understanding of key elements of the nature of science (the tentative, empirical, and creative nature of scientific knowledge, as well as the difference between observation and inference) over the course of the intervention. The other group did not. However, even with the enhanced, explicit curriculum, only 24% of the students achieved a consistently accurate understanding of the nature of science. These findings support the idea that inquiry alone is insufficient to improve student understanding of the nature of science; explicit, reflective instruction is necessary as well. The researchers further conclude that this instruction should be incorporated throughout teaching over an extended period of time in order to see gains among a larger fraction of students. The researchers emphasize that explicit, reflective teaching does not mean didactic teaching, but rather instruction that specifically targets nature of science concepts and that provides students with opportunities to relate their own activities to the activities of scientists and the scientific community more broadly.

Lederman, N.G. 1999. Teachers’ understanding of the nature of science and classroom practice: Factors that facilitate or impede the relationship.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching  36(8):916-929. Five high school biology teachers were observed weekly for one year to examine whether their conceptions of the nature of science were reflected in their teaching. The researcher also collected data from questionnaires, student and teacher interviews, and classroom materials. All five teachers had accurate understandings of the nature of science. The most experienced teachers used pedagogical techniques consistent with the nature of science, though they weren’t explicitly trying to do so and did not claim to be trying to improve students’ understanding of the nature of science. Less experienced teachers did not teach in a manner consistent with their views of the nature of science. This suggests that an adequate understanding of the nature and process of science and curricular flexibility alone are not sufficient to ensure that teachers will use pedagogical techniques that reflect that understanding. In addition, the researchers found that students in these classrooms gained little understanding of the nature of science, regardless of whether they were taught by a more or less experienced teacher. This lends further support to the idea that teachers need to be explicit about how lessons and activities relate to the nature and process of science in order for students to improve their understandings in this area. The researcher concludes that teacher education programs need to make a concerted effort to help teachers improve their ability to explicitly translate their understanding of the nature of science into their teaching practices. Furthermore, teachers should be encouraged to view an understanding of the nature of science as an important pedagogical objective in its own right.

Lederman, N.G., and J.S. Lederman. 2004. Revising instruction to teach nature of science.  The Science Teacher  71(9):36-39. The authors describe seven aspects of the nature of science that are important for K-12 students to understand:

• the difference between observation and inference
• the difference between laws and theories
• that science is based on observations of the natural world
• that science involves creativity
• that scientific knowledge is partially subjective
• that science is socially and culturally embedded
• that scientific knowledge is subject to change.

They argue that most lessons can be modified to emphasize one or more of these ideas and provide an example from biology instruction. Many teachers use an activity in which students study a slide of growing tissue and count cells at different stages of mitosis in order to estimate the lengths of these stages. The authors recommend modifying this activity in several ways:

• asking students to reason about how they know when one stage ends to emphasize the sort of subjectivity with which scientists must deal
• asking students to grapple with ambiguity in their data
• asking students to reason about why different groups came up with different estimates and how confident they are in their estimates in order to emphasize the tentativity of scientific knowledge
• asking students to distinguish between what they directly observed on the slide and what they inferred from those observations.

The authors emphasize that incorporating the nature and process of science into this activity involves, not changing the activity itself, but carefully crafting reflective questions that make explicit relevant aspects of the nature and process of science.

Lederman, N.G., and D.L. Zeidler. 1987. Science teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science: Do they really influence teacher behavior?  Science Education  71(5):721-734. Eighteen high school biology classrooms led by experienced teachers were studied over the course of one semester. Teachers’ understandings of the nature and process of science were assessed at the beginning and end of the semester. In addition, the researchers made extensive observations of each classroom at three different points in the semester and categorized the teachers’ and students’ behaviors along many variables relating to teaching the nature and process of science. The researchers found  no  relationship between a teacher’s knowledge of the nature and process of science and the teacher’s general instructional approach, the nature-of-science content addressed in the classroom, the teacher’s attitude, the classroom atmosphere, or the students’ interactions with the teacher. This finding challenges the widely held assumption that student understanding of the nature and process of science can be improved simply by improving teacher understanding. Instead, the teachers’ level of understanding of this topic was unrelated to classroom performance. The authors emphasize that this doesn’t indicate that a teacher’s ideas don’t matter at all; teachers need at least a basic understanding of the topics they will teach, but this alone isn’t enough. The authors suggest that to improve their teaching in this area, instructors also need to be prepared with strategies designed specifically for teaching the nature and process of science.

Moss, D.M. 2001. Examining student conceptions of the nature of science.  International Journal of Science Education  23(8):771-790. Five 11th and 12th grade students, with a range of academic achievement, taking an environmental science class, were interviewed six times over the course of a year. The class was project-based and engaged students in data collection for real scientific research. Interviews focused on students’ views of selected aspects of the nature and process of science. The researcher coded and interpreted transcripts of the interviews. Major findings include:

• In contrast to previous studies, most students understood that scientific knowledge builds on itself and is tentative. Students also seemed to understand science as a social activity.
• Many students didn’t know what makes science science and had trouble distinguishing science from other ways of knowing.
• Many students viewed science as merely procedural.
• Most students didn’t understand that scientists regularly generate new research questions as they work.
• Despite the authentic, project-based nature of the course, there were few shifts in student views of the nature and process of science.

This research supports the view that explicit instruction is necessary to improve student understanding of the nature/process of science. The researcher suggests that this can be done by having students develop their own descriptions of the fundamentals of the nature and process of science. The researcher also suggests that teachers need to focus on helping students understand the boundaries of science, perhaps by explicitly discussing how science compares to other human endeavors.

Sadler, T.D., F.W. Chambers, and D. Zeidler. 2004. Student conceptualizations of the nature of science in response to a socioscientific issue.  International Journal of Science Education  26(4):387-409. A group of average- to below average-achieving high school students was asked to read contradictory reports about the status of the global warming debate and answer a series of open-ended questions that related to the nature and process of science. Each report included data to support its conclusions. The researchers examined and coded students’ oral and written responses. On the positive side, the researchers found that:

• Most students understood that science and social issues are intertwined.
• Most students were comfortable with the idea that scientific data can be used to support different conclusions and that ideological positions may influence data interpretation.
• Almost half of the students were unable to accurately identify and describe data, and some conflated expectations and opinions with data.
• There was a tendency for students to view the interpretation consistent with their prior opinion as the most persuasive argument – even in cases where they judged the opposite interpretation to have the most scientific merit. This suggests that students may not incorporate scientific information into their decision-making process, dichotomizing their personal beliefs and scientific evidence.

The researchers suggest that instruction should focus on the above two issues and that teachers should encourage students to consider scientific findings when making decisions. In addition, students should be encouraged to deeply reflect on socioscientific issues and consider them from multiple perspectives.

Scharmann, L.C., M.U. Smith, M.C. James, and M. Jensen. 2005. Explicit reflective nature of science instruction: Evolution, intelligent design, and umbrellaology.  Journal of Science Teacher Education  16(1):27-41. Through multiple iterations of a preservice science teacher education course, the researchers designed a 10 hour instructional unit. In the unit, students:

• attempt to arrange a set of statements along a continuum from more to less scientific
• develop a set of criteria for making such judgments
• participate in a set of inquiry activities designed to teach the nature of science (e.g., the black box activity)
• read and reflect on articles about the nature of science
• analyze intelligent design, evolutionary biology, and umbrellaology (a satirical description of the field of umbrella studies) in terms of the criteria they developed.

The final iteration of this set of activities was judged by the authors to be highly effective at changing students’ views of the nature of science and perhaps even helping them recognize that intelligent design is less scientific than evolutionary biology. Furthermore, the researchers suggest that using a continuum approach regarding the classification of endeavors as more or less scientific may be helpful for students who have strong religious commitments and that explicit, respectful discussion of religion in relation to science early in instruction is likewise important for these students.

Schwartz, R.S., N.G. Lederman, and B. Crawford. 2004. Developing views of nature of science in an authentic context: An explicit approach to bridging the gap between nature of science and scientific inquiry.  Science Education  88(4):610-645. A group of preservice science teachers participated in a program that included 10 weeks of work with a scientific research group, discussions of research and the nature of science, and writing prompts which asked the preservice teachers to make connections between their research and the process of science. Participants were interviewed and observed, and responded to a questionnaire about the nature of science. Eighty-five percent of the participants improved their understanding of the nature of science over the course of the program. The two participants who did not improve their understanding were the two that focused on the content of their research and did not reflect on how this related to the nature of science. Participants also seemed to gain a better understanding of how to teach the nature and process of science explicitly. The researchers conclude that the research experience alone did little to improve students understanding, but that this experience was important for providing the context in which active reflection about the nature and process of science could occur. They recommend that scientific inquiry in the K-12 classroom incorporate reflective activities and explicit discussions relating the inquiry activity to the nature and process of science.

Zeidler, D.L., K.A. Walker, W.A. Ackett, and M.L. Simmons. 2002. Tangled up in views: Beliefs in the nature of science and responses to socioscientific dilemmas.  Science Education  86(3):343-367. A sample of 248 high school and college students were given open-ended questions eliciting their views of the nature of science. In addition, researchers elicited students’ views on a socioscientific issue (the appropriateness of animal research) using both a Likert scale item and open-ended questions. From this large sample, 42 pairs of students with differing views of the appropriateness of animal research were selected. These pairs of students were allowed to discuss the issue with each other and were probed by an interviewer. Finally, they were presented with data anomalous to their own view and were probed again on their confidence in the data and their willingness to change their view. Researchers analyzed these 82 students’ responses to the open-ended questions using concept mapping and compared their responses to Likert items. They found that students  did  change their views on the issue as a result of discussion and exposure to anomalous data. They also found that younger students tended to be less skeptical of anomalous data presented to them from an official-sounding report. In only a few cases were students’ views of the nature of science obviously related to their analysis of the socioscientific issue. These were mainly situations in which a student expressed a belief that scientists interpret data to suit their personal opinion, and then, correspondingly, the student selectively accepted or rejected evidence according to whether it supported his or her opinion. In addition, many students seemed to believe that all opinions are equally valid and immune to change regardless of the scientific evidence. The authors conclude that instruction on the nature of science should be incorporated throughout science courses and should include discussion in which students are asked to contrast different viewpoints on socioscientific issues and evaluate how different types of data might support or refute those positions.

Thanks to Norm Lederman and Joanne Olson for consultation on relevant research articles.

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Recent UW Law Faculty Scholarship: Interrupting Gun Violence; Integrating Tribal Law into the Legal Research and Writing Curriculum: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies; Administering Facts-And-Circumstances-Based Tax Tests; and Fammigration Web

Here is the latest faculty scholarship appearing in the  University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Studies Research Papers series  found on SSRN.

• Interrupting Gun Violence 104 Boston L. Rev. 769 (2024) by CHRISTOPHER LAU , UW Law School

Against the backdrop of declining crime rates, gun violence and gun-related homicides have only risen over the last three years. Just as it historically has, the brunt of that violence has been borne by poor Black and brown communities. These communities are especially impacted: they are not only far more likely to be the victims of gun violence, but are also the primary targets of police surveillance and harassment. People of color are disproportionately prosecuted for gun crimes, which, in part, prompted the Black Public Defenders Amicus Brief in support of expanding gun rights in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen. Recognizing that the carceral approach of policing and prosecution has failed to prevent gun violence and has harmed Black and brown communities, this Article sets forth community violence interruption groups as a promising decarceral alternative. Violence interruption groups address violence by working with the people who are most impacted by cyclical gun violence and intervene by mediating conflicts, defusing imminent violence, and encouraging people to give up their firearms. Building on the work of abolitionist scholars and organizers, this Article centers the role of Violence Interrupters as an important alternative to policing and punitive prosecution. It explores legal changes that might minimize the legal barriers to violence interruption, including statutory reform, mens rea reform, expansion of the Second Amendment, and recognition of an innocent possession defense.

• Integrating Tribal Law into the Legal Research and Writing Curriculum: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies 31 Perspectives (Forthcoming, 2024) by BONNIE J. SHUCHA , UW Law School, Amber Madole, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, and Rebecca Plevel, University of South Carolina- Joseph F. Rice School of Law

In the United States, the Constitution recognizes three types of sovereigns: federal, state, and tribal. Each of these sovereign entities possesses the inherent powers of self-government and has the authority to address the social, economic, safety, and cultural needs of their citizens. However, under the mainstream conception of American law, tribal governments are often overlooked. This narrow perspective fails to acknowledge the significant contributions of Native Nations, which play a vital role in shaping the legal landscape of the United States. If we want our students to develop a more comprehensive understanding of America’s laws, we must teach them that the United States is a union not just of fifty states, five territories, and a federal district, but also of 574 unique, federally recognized tribes.

As an integral part of the American legal landscape, tribal law should also be an integral part of the law school curriculum, not only as an elective or specialized topic but integrated alongside federal, state, and local law. Legal research and writing instructors are pivotal in this endeavor. They have the unique opportunity to introduce tribal law within the core first-year curriculum. This approach allows instructors to familiarize students with the presence and relevance of tribal law, preparing them for its application in the various legal scenarios that they will encounter later in their law school and legal careers. We believe that including tribal law in LRW instruction can serve as an important step towards inclusivity in the legal profession. Given that LRW courses are where most law students form their bedrock understanding of legal authority and legal information, these courses present a substantial opportunity to help students understand the U.S. justice system in all its nuance and complexity.

Graduates with an awareness of tribal law will be better equipped to serve tribal communities, recognize and research tribal law issues when they arise, and contribute to the broader legal discourse surrounding Native American rights and interests. They may also increase their employment prospects as knowledge of tribal law may provide an advantage in some positions. This knowledge does not just benefit those working directly with or for Tribal Nations; it is essential for all legal professionals given that tribes interact extensively with federal and state governments, businesses, and individuals. Understanding tribal law empowers legal professionals to effectively address legal issues in Indian Country and contribute to a more inclusive legal system.

This Article will explore the benefits of incorporating tribal law into legal education. Part one presents actionable strategies for the effective integration of tribal law into the legal research and writing curriculum, part two explains the importance and upsides of introducing law students to tribal law research, and part three addresses some of the challenges. Two appendices provide curated lists of resources for further exploration of tribal law.

• Administering Facts-And-Circumstances-Based Tax Tests 76 Baylor L. Rev. (Forthcoming, 2024) by EMILY CAUBLE , UW Law School

Oftentimes, the appropriate tax treatment of a transaction or event depends on a holistic analysis of relevant facts and circumstances. Facts-and-circumstances-based tests are challenging to administer because they are challenging to enforce and because they address challenging topics on which to provide useful administrative guidance. When a taxpayer claims tax treatment that depends on application of such a test, the IRS cannot determine whether the taxpayer’s claimed position is correct without knowing the relevant facts and circumstances. Yet, often, taxpayers are not required to disclose the relevant facts and circumstances when filing a tax return, making enforcement difficult. Likewise, providing administrative guidance on facts-and-circumstances-based tests is daunting. If the IRS provides concrete examples of the application of such a test, there is a risk the concrete examples will mislead taxpayers. Taxpayers may come away with the impression that the concrete examples illustrate universal rules, which is not the case given the facts-and-circumstances-based nature of the test. If the IRS steers away from offering concrete examples, however, taxpayers will face uncertainty when attempting to determine their tax treatment. This Article proposes a new, two-fold approach to administering facts-and-circumstances-based tests. First, lawmakers ought to require more detailed, standardized disclosure from taxpayers who claim tax positions based upon certain facts-and-circumstances-based tests. Second, when offering examples that illustrate the likely application of such tests, the IRS should steer taxpayers towards claiming the likely outcome but also supplying the relevant disclosure in case the taxpayer’s facts warrant departure from the likely outcome. Making facts-and-circumstances-based tests more administrable aligns with the IRS’s recent pledge to focus additional auditing resources on taxpayers with higher incomes.

• Fammigration Web 103 Boston L. Rev. 117 (2023) by S. LISA WASHINGTON , UW Law School

A growing body of scholarship discusses the expansive nature of the criminal legal system. What remains overlooked are other parts of the carceral state with similarly punitive logics. This Article focuses on the undertheorized convergence of the family regulation system and the immigration system. I argue that their cumulative effects increase the risk of immigration detention, deportation, and ultimately, permanent family separation for non-citizen and mixed status families. This Article provides the first theoretical account of family regulation and immigration convergence. When referring to this phenomenon I utilize the term “fammigration web,” similar to the way other scholars refer to criminal legal and immigration system overlaps as “crimmigration.” Although the exact number of non-citizen families impacted by the family regulation system remains unclear, the existing literature suggests that thousands of families are adversely affected. While practitioners and advocates are increasingly discussing the relationship between the family regulation and immigration systems, scholarship has not fully caught up. This Article fills that gap by identifying how nodes in the fammigration web exacerbate the risk of family separation for non-citizen and mixed status families.

This Article makes three central contributions. One, it provides the first theoretical account of family regulation and immigration convergence. Two, it examines how this convergence marks and subordinates immigrant families. Three, it situates efforts to shrink fammigration alongside broader efforts to shrink the carceral state. To dismantle carceral logics, we must identify how they are produced across systems. While this requires long-term strategies, this Article offers a few immediate ways to shrink the fammigration web.

For the full text of these works and additional scholarship from UW Law faculty and staff, visit the  University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series  on SSRN. A free email subscription is available at the top right of the page.

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‘Not my boy.’ When teachers are harassed by students, some schools and parents fail to help

Senior Lecturer, School of Education, University of Adelaide

Lecturer in Education Futures, University of South Australia

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Since the start of this school year, we have been surveying teachers in South Australia about sexist views among students. This is part of our research into how online worlds are shaping Australian schooling.

In May, we reported the first round of our research . We found South Australian teachers were experiencing a rise in sexist and other anti-social views among students, similar to those reported interstate and overseas .

Teachers in our as yet unpublished study spoke of an alarming increase in misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and sexist language and behaviours, mostly by boys and young men targeting girls and young female teachers. This is prompting some women to leave the profession .

A new theme to emerge from our research is bystander inaction. This is when school leaders, other teachers, or parents downplay what is happening or do nothing or little in response.

Read more: 'Make me a sandwich': our survey's disturbing picture of how some boys treat their teachers

Between February and May this year, we advertised an anonymous survey on the Teachers of Adelaide Facebook group. This involves teachers from public, private co-ed and single-sex schools.

The survey called for short-answer responses to questions about sexism, racism, homophobia or other anti-social behaviours and language.

We received 160 responses. Almost 80% of the responses were from female teachers, who were mostly from high schools. On top of this, we did ten interviews with teachers who responded, who were willing to talk at further length.

Teachers are not prepared to help

Some female teachers in our study experienced abuse and harassment by students when they were on their own. But it sometimes occurred around other female staff or teachers.

One female teacher who has been in the profession for 14 years told us how a Year 11 boy backed her into a corner of the staff room.

And the other staff members, they didn’t know what to do because he was stronger than all of us.

Other teachers spoke about how they had no training or preparation to deal with this kind of behaviour. One female teacher said:

I don’t think my teaching degree prepared me for any of this […]. It was a bit of a culture shock going into a school.

Another female teacher said teacher education and professional development did not acknowledge “you could possibly be the victim of sexual harassment as a teacher”. She added “that really pisses me off to be honest”.

It’s different for male teachers

A male interviewee described stepping into a senior high school classroom after the female teacher for that class had resigned due to the behaviour of male students.

She was having sexually suggestive things said to her by her students and it was not really dealt with appropriately. And she got to the point where she felt sick even thinking about coming to work […].

But as this male teacher explained, male students did not treat him the same way.

So, I just walk into the room, and they’re like, yeah, that’s the […] authority figure. It’s a man.

Other male teachers said gender-based harassment and abuse was too big an issue for them to tackle as part of their already busy and complex jobs. As one told us:

the scale of the problem is too big, and it’s really tangential as far as our duties go.

School leaders are not helping

Female teachers are telling us some school leaders (which include principals and deputy principals) are not treating these issues seriously.

In one school, a female teacher left after being told by students as young as Year 7 she “looked like a porn star”. A female colleague told us how

she told the principal that she was being sexually harassed, the principal just said, ‘Well, just because you said it’s harassment, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is’.

Other respondents talked about a “hush hush” response from schools when teachers left due to student behaviour.

anything that’s challenging, [the principal is] like, ‘No, we’re not discussing that. I’ll have a discussion in private with you’.

In other industries – where the harassment of women has been ignored or covered up – this has been referred to as “ institutional gaslighting ”.

Parents are ignoring warnings

When there is a behavioural issue with a student, one of the first steps a teacher can take is to talk to the parents. But teachers in our study said parents often did not believe their sons could behave this way. As one female teacher described it, there is

a lot of eye rolling like, I can’t believe you’re treating this as an issue.

Another female teacher told us:

usually I get the response from the parent, ‘Not my boy. My boy would not do that. My boy would not have those values’.

The same teacher continued:

I’m just wondering how many parents really know their sons and have been prepared to sit down and talk about consent with their children, have been prepared to sit down and talk about respect with their children?

Read more: We research online 'misogynist radicalisation'. Here's what parents of boys should know

What can we do?

Bystander inaction to harassment and abuse of women and girls is not new . Research shows it thrives within cultures and systems where there is poor understanding of gender equity and little recognition we are all responsible for preventing or responding to this behaviour.

In Australia, we have a decades’ long policy vacuum around gender equity in schooling. So our systems are ill-equipped and reluctant to deal with this issue, despite warnings schools are becoming breeding grounds for gender-based violence and teachers are leaving.

We now have mandatory consent education , but as our research indicates, this is not being delivered consistently or effectively across schools.

Education around gender must be part of teaching degrees and a central component of the Australian Curriculum. And all of us in the community – including parents – need to take responsibility for the way men and boys treat women and girls.

• High school
• Teacher shortage
• Gender-based violence
• Workplace harassment
• primary schools
• Andrew Tate
• Teacher wellbeing

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More From Forbes

A psychologist explains the ‘streisand effect’ —when censorship fails.

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What makes a forbidden fruit so much more alluring than one that’s readily accessible? Research ... [+] holds the answer.

If someone told you specifically not to think of a white elephant, chances are you wouldn’t be able to help but imagine it—the very thing you were told to avoid. This is because we humans, by nature, are curious and rebellious; we strive to know more, and we often bristle when we’re told what we can and cannot do—especially when it concerns our right to knowledge.

This very blend of curiosity and defiance is what often leads to a fascinating and ironic psychological phenomenon: the “Streisand effect.”

What Is the ‘Streisand Effect’?

Research published by European Studies in 2022 explains the paradoxical story of this phenomenon:

In 2003, the California Coastal Records Project shared a photo online as part of an effort to document coastal erosion along the Florida coastline. However, the photo also happened to capture the Malibu mansion of the famous singer and actress Barbra Streisand. In February of that year, Streisand sued the photographer, Kenneth Adelman, as well as the online photo sales company that hosted the image, for invasion of privacy—seeking a whopping $50 million in damages. Her intent was to protect her privacy by having the photo removed from the internet.

However, Streisand’s lawsuit only served to make the issue she was facing exponentially worse. Before taking legal action, the photo of her residence had been downloaded only six times—two of those times by her own lawyers. But once news of the lawsuit broke, the photo became an internet sensation; it was downloaded over 420,000 times in the span of a month. By December 2003, the Los Angeles Superior Court had dismissed the lawsuit, citing that the photo was taken from public airspace and did not violate any privacy laws.

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This ironic outcome—where attempts to censor, remove, or hide information only serves to amplify it more in the public’s eye—has come to be known as the “Streisand effect.”

What Causes The Streisand Effect?

A 2015 study published in the International Journal of Communication shed light on the mechanisms behind the Streisand effect—revealing them to be as simple as they are ironic. Long before Barbra Streisand’s unfortunate legal battle, scholars and thinkers had recognized that censorship often backfires.

The study’s authors cite the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote about the consequences of emperor Nero’s censorship: “So long as the possession of these writings was attended by danger, they were eagerly sought and read: when there was no longer any difficulty in securing them, they fell into oblivion.” Tacitus’ observation, despite being made in 109 AD, underscores a timeless truth: when something is made inaccessible, it becomes even more desirable.

It’s simple: much like the forbidden fruit, the more we’re told to avoid something, that we can’t see it or know about it, the more we want to know why it’s forbidden—and what makes it so taboo or illicit.

How Does The ‘Streisand Effect’ Manifest?

Despite only receiving its name in 2003, the Streisand effect has been observed both before and after its conceptualization—and it will continue to surface so long as there are attempts to censor information. Here are a few notable examples that illustrate how the Streisand effect can manifests in a variety of contexts:

1. Martha Payne’s School Lunches

In 2012, nine-year-old Martha Payne started a blog called “ NeverSeconds ” to document her school lunches. Her straightforward reviews and photos quickly gained attention, which, in turn, sparked discussions about the quality of school meals. However, when her local council attempted to ban her from posting pictures of her lunches—as the school’s kitchen staff began fearing their job security—the story went viral. What began as a small blog soon turned into a global sensation; it ultimately garnered millions of views and led to improvements in school meals—not just in her school, but across the country. The attempt to suppress her blog only amplified the issue it highlighted.

2. The Banning of Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

The 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust became notorious for its graphic content, leading to it being banned in several countries. The film’s extreme depiction of violence—including scenes of real-life animal cruelty—prompted authorities to censor it, believing that its availability would cause public outrage. However, these bans only fueled curiosity and increased demand for the film; it’s now a cult classic among horror fans. The more the authorities tried to suppress it, the more people wanted to see what all the controversy was about—ultimately solidifying Cannibal Holocaust as an infamous piece of cinema history.

3. The 2010 WikiLeaks Prohibition

In 2010, WikiLeaks released a trove of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, which exposed majorly sensitive information about international relations. In response, several governments—including the United States—attempted to block access to the WikiLeaks website and discourage the dissemination of the documents. These efforts backfired spectacularly; the more governments tried to suppress the information, the more people were determined to access and share it. The documents spread like wildfire across the internet, and WikiLeaks gained global prominence.

4. Celebrities’ Attempts to Delete Incriminating Social Media Posts

In the age of social media, many celebrities have tried to erase their digital footprints by deleting incriminating posts. For example, PewDiePie —one of the world’s most popular YouTubers—deleted evidence of a live stream in which he used racial slurs, hoping to bury the incident. Similarly, Katie Hopkins attempted to delete her Islamophobic tweets following the Manchester terror attack. However, such actions like these only spur the public to dig deeper, resurfacing their posts (as well as older, more incriminating ones) and spreading them even further. In many cases, this leads to faster and more severe public backlash—with careers being damaged or even ended as a result. The Streisand effect, in these instances, turned attempts at damage control into accelerants for cancellation.

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