Tanya Santangelo

Using Self-Regulated Strategy Development to Support Students Who Have “Trubol Giting Thangs Into Werds”

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is a well-established, thoroughly validated instructional model used to teach a variety of writing strategies to elementary, middle, and high school aged students. In this article, an overview of SRSD is presented. Specifically, this includes a discussion about why students struggle with various aspects of the writing process and an explanation of how strategy instruction is uniquely well suited for writing instruction. Next, the SRSD stages are described and an example of how SRSD was used to teach a story grammar strategy to fifth-grade students is offered. Finally, the principles for evaluation and characteristics of effective instruction are discussed and additional resources are listed.

Research-Based Writing Practices and the Common Core: Meta-Analysis and Meta-Synthesis.

In order to meet writing objectives specified in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), many teachers need to make significant changes in how writing is taught. While CCSS identified what students need to master, it did not provide guidance on how teachers are to meet these writing benchmarks. The current article presents research-supported practices that can be used to meet CCSS writing objectives in kindergarten to grade 8. We identified these practices by conducting a new meta-analysis of writing intervention studies, which included true and quasi-experiments, as well as single-subject design studies. In addition, we conducted a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies examining the practices of exceptional literacy teachers. Studies in 20 previous reviews served as the data source for these analyses. The recommended practices derived from these analyses are presented within a framework that takes into account both the social contextual and cognitive/motivational nature of writing.

Examining the Validity of Single-Occasion, Single-Genre, Holistically Scored Writing Assessments

This chapter presents a study exploring two key assumptions underlying the use of scores generated from single-genre, single-occasion, holistically scored writing assessments in large-scale assessments for evaluating progress toward state writing standards: (1) a students writing ability across genres is sufficiently stable as to allow for performance in a single genre (e.g., story) to represent a students performance in alternative, unassessed genres (e.g., persuasive, or informative); and (2) a holistic score is a valid and adequate measure of the multiple writing abilities which it purports to represent. One hundred and five 5th-grade students completed three compositions: story, persuasive, and informative. Each composition was scored for essential genre elements, paragraph conventions and construction, sentence construction and conventions, and vocabulary. The results from the study suggest that the writing assessments may provide limited information about a students writing performance across the range of skills represented in a states writing content standards. Keywords:holistic quality score; informative writing; large-scale writing assessments; performance assessment; persuasive writing; single-genre, single-occasion, holistically scored writing assessments; story writing

Chapter 10 Constructing Effective Instructional Toolkits: A Selective Review of Evidence-Based Practices for Students with Learning Disabilities

Evidence-based practices have been shown to meaningfully improve learner outcomes by bodies of high-quality research studies and should therefore be prioritized for use in schools, especially with struggling learners such as students with learning disabilities. Although many resources are available on the internet with information about evidence-based practices, the magnitude and technical nature of the websites are often overwhelming to practitioners and are therefore not frequently used as part of the instructional decision-making process. In this chapter, we aim to provide a “one stop shopping experience” for readers interested in evidence-based practices for students with learning disabilities by reviewing five relevant website. Specifically, for each website we review (a) the procedures used to classify the evidence-based status of practices, (b) the classification scheme used to indicate the level of research support for practices, and (c) the practices reviewed for students with learning disabilities and their evidence-based classification. We conclude with a discussion of issues related to interpreting and applying information on evidence-based practices from these websites.