RESEARCH-BASED INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES IN WRITING
Three recent and significant publications—all meta-analyses of large-scale research—inform
effective practices in writing instruction.
A. Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High
Schools, by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin http://www.all4ed.org/files/WritingNext.pdf
This publication highlights specific techniques for teaching writing and identifies 11
elements of writing instruction found to be effective for helping students learn to write well
and to use writing as a tool for learning. Recommendations include the following:
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6.
Teach writing strategies for planning, revising, and editing.
Teach summarization strategies.
Use collaborative writing.
Set specific product goals for students.
Use word processing as instructional supports for writing assignments.
Teach sentence combining, which teaches students to construct more complex,
sophisticated sentences.
7. Teach prewriting, which helps students generate or organize ideas for writing.
8. Use inquiry activities, which helps students in analyzing concrete data so they can
develop ideas and content for a particular writing task.
9. Use a process writing approach that provides extended writing opportunities, writing
for authentic audiences, personalized instruction.
10. Have students study models of good writing.
11. Use writing as a tool for learning across content areas.
B. Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading, by Steve Graham and
Michael Hebert
http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/Media/Publications/WritingToRead_01.pdf
This publication identifies writing practices found to be effective in helping students
increase their reading skills and comprehension. Recommendations include the following:
A project of the American Institutes for Research, under funding from the US Department of
Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, ED-VAE-09-O-0060.
1. Have students write about the texts they read. Comprehension of science, social
studies, and language arts texts improves when students write about what they read,
specifically when they…
 Respond to a text in writing (Writing Personal Reactions, Analyzing and Interpreting
the Text).
 Write summaries of a text.
 Write notes about a text.
 Answer questions about a text in writing.
2. Teach students the writing skills and processes that go into creating text, specifically
when teachers…
 Teach the Process of Writing, Text Structures for Writing, Paragraph or Sentence
Construction Skills (Improves Reading Comprehension)
 Teach Spelling & Sentence Construction Skills (Improves Reading Fluency)
 Teach Spelling Skills (Improves Word Reading Skills)
3. Increase how much students write.
C. Informing Writing: The Benefits of Formative Assessment, by Steve Graham, Karen Harris,
and Michael Hebert
http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/Media/Publications/InformingWriting.pdf
This publication examines the effectiveness of formative writing assessment and identifies
best practices in writing assessment. Recommendations include the following:
1. Use formative writing assessment to enhance students’ writing. Writing improves when
teachers…
 Provide feedback to improve student writing.
 Teach students how to assess their own writing.
 Monitor students’ writing progress on an ongoing basis.
2. Apply best practices for assessing writing in the classroom.
 Allow students to use the mode of writing in which they are most proficient when
completing a writing assessment —pencil/paper or word processing.
 Minimize the extent to which handwriting legibility or computer printing bias
judgments of writing quality.
 Mask the writer’s identify when scoring papers.
 Randomly order students’ papers before scoring them.
 Collect multiple samples of students’ writing.
 Ensure that classroom writing assessments are reliably scored.
A project of the American Institutes for Research, under funding from the US Department of
Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, ED-VAE-09-O-0060.