With adolescents’ reading skills garnering increasing attention in school improvement discussions, a report released last week urges educators and policymakers also to address the need for effective ...

The importance of developing strong writing skills seems to be gaining more and more attention almost daily. Employers spend billions remediating writing skills. With the new SAT, college admissions ...

When you teach writing, as I do, you tend to receive a lot of unsolicited advice from all over campus about how to do your job. I imagine that this is at least in part because all of us, in one ...

Writing is often difficult for educators to teach, challenging for students to do, and hard for administrators to monitor and evaluate. Yet writing well—and the high-quality writing instruction behind ...

Recent scholarly efforts have advanced our understanding of writing instruction by examining both the cognitive and motivational dimensions that underpin student development. Research in this area has ...

Harvard in 1900 had only one required course -- freshman composition -- reflecting the faculty’s belief that writing was too important a skill to be left to caprice. After all, back in 1874-- 1874! -- ...

An instructional leader in a Bay Area school district told me last week that while they are a bright spot in improving reading for the last three years, they still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic ...

Writing is hard, and writing at length is harder. But there are no studies on whether it's better to teach students to write sentences before asking them to write at length. There isn’t much good ...

People write for a variety of purposes—including recording, persuading, learning, communicating, entertaining, self-expression, and reflection—and proficiency in writing for one purpose does not ...

Novice writers may struggle with conventions of academic writing, good habits and processes for developing academic essays, and/or grammar, mechanics and syntax. Through the directed self-placement ...