Description:

Co-Principal Investigators: Barr, Christopher; Galloway, Emily Phillips

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to examine how language skills change over time and how this supports academic writing in 4th through 8th grades. Language skills are necessary for writing complex texts as students get older, but research has not yet explored how these skills develop over time. The current study will explore how academic language (language features used in educational and scientific contexts) for writing, writing quality, and academic language for reading develop and change over time, and how these factors relate to each other. Data for this study comes from previously-funded Reading for Understanding project (Catalyzing Comprehension Through Discussion and Debate). Information from this study may be used to develop teaching practices and interventions to help students learn to write more effectively.

Project Activities: In this study, researchers will use data from students in 4th through 8th grade to explore individual variation in the development of language and writing skills. They will look at how academic language in both reading and writing change over time, and how they relate to each other and writing quality.

Products: Products include evidence of the developmental trajectories and relationship between academic language for writing, academic language for reading, and writing quality. The research team will also produce peer reviewed publications.

Structured Abstract

Setting: The data used in this study was collected in urban districts in the Northeast United States.

Sample: The sample includes data from approximately 530 students in grades 4 through 8.

Intervention: In this exploratory study, the researchers will examine the developmental trajectories of academic language for writing, academic language for reading, and writing quality from 4th to 8th grades. The first phase of the research will be to examine the factor structure of the Core Academic Language Skills Instrument Writing subscale (CALS-Write), which assesses expressive language skills that correspond to linguistic features of academic texts but that are rare in colloquial conversations. This phase will also examine the factor structure of the Writing Quality measure. The second and third phases of the research will look at CALS-Write growth trajectories across 4th and 8th grade, and the concurrent development of CALS-Write, CALS-Read, and Writing Quality.

Research Design and Methods: In 2010, the Institute funded a number of teams under the Reading for Understanding Initiative. Each team was tasked with conducting basic/exploratory research on reading comprehension, developing interventions to improve reading comprehension, and testing those interventions for efficacy. Data from one of the teams will be used for this study. In this dataset, a total of 1,823 students have at least three waves of complete writing and assessment data, and from this, a stratified random sample of 530 students will be selected for use in the current study. The sample will be largely nationally representative, but researchers will oversample students ineligible for free or reduced priced lunch.

Control Condition: Due to the nature of the research design, there is no control condition.

Key Measures: The primary measures of academic language in the current study are: (1) the CALS-Read of the Core Academic Language Skills Instrument (CALS-I), which measures academic language skills shown to support reading comprehension; and (2) the CALS-Write subscales, which is generated to capture productive academic language skills in students' writing. The research team will examine Writing Quality for an argumentative and explanatory writing task coded for holistic writing quality. They will use socio-demographic data, teacher characteristics, and school-level climate variables as control variables.

Data Analytic Strategy: Researchers will use a series of multilevel confirmatory factor analysis models to determine the dimensionality of CALS-Write. The team will also examine measure invariance across waves of data. To examine growth trajectories and concurrent development of academic language and writing quality, researchers will use multiple indicator growth modeling.

Related IES Project: Catalyzing Comprehension Through Discussion and Debate (R305F100026)