WRITE Center for Secondary Students: Writing Research to Improve Teaching and Evaluation

There were two major components of the focused program of research for the WRITE Center: one exploration and one development study. In the exploration study, researchers conducted secondary data analyses of student writing data to identify critical features of high-quality writing and any differences in critical features according to student subgroups and content area. Researchers surveyed teacher writing practices in 6th to 12th-grade history and differences in teacher writing practices according to student subgroups. In the subsequent development study, researchers developed and piloted an intervention to improve the teaching and learning of source-based argument writing in history.

Study 1: Exploration Study: The Center worked to identify features of high-quality writing and what intervention strategies are associated with high-quality writing among students in secondary school. First, researchers analyzed writing samples from middle and high school students who participated in two previous studies of literacy interventions (i.e., Pathways to Academic Success Project (Pathway), and the College, Career, and Community Writers Project (C3WP)). Researchers then explored the features of high-quality writing for various subgroups of students. Second, the Center explored which aspects from the extant interventions might be most effective at improving student writing. Third, the Center collected and analyzed essays from middle school and high school history classes to determine to what degree the features of high-quality writing in history are the same as the features of high-quality writing in English Language Arts. Finally, the Center surveyed history teachers regarding their writing practices and prior training, collected teacher assignments and student writing samples, and conducted classroom observations to understand current writing practices and needs in history argument writing instruction; and field-test source-based argument prompts in history.

Design: Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to develop and implement the essay scoring rubrics for the argumentative essay components adapted from the National Writing Project’s Analytical Writing Continuum (AWC) scale. Both analytic and holistic writing categories were identified through multiple iterations of adapting the AWC scale. The final scale includes the following analytic categories: Prompt, Claim, Organization, Introduction, Conclusion, Paragraphs, Evidence, Commentary, Sentence Fluency, Syntactic Variety, Diction, Conventions, and Tone.

Study 2: Development Study: The Center used findings from the Exploration Study to develop, field-test, and pilot a professional development intervention for middle school and high school history teachers. The Center used Pathway and C3WP strategies, tools, and curriculum materials most associated with improving student outcomes. The intervention also incorporated specific self-regulation procedures (goal setting and self-assessment) from Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). A small-scale randomized control trial evaluated the promise of this new professional development intervention to improve student source-based argument writing and performance on standardized tests. 

Design: This one-year study featured randomly assigned treatment (n=13) and control (n=15) teachers, with treatment teachers participating in the intervention consisting of PD and control teachers teaching writing as usual. In addition to randomly assigned treatment and control groups, the research team also invited teachers who participated in the pilot study of the intervention to participate in a second year of PD to evaluate the impact of an additional year of the treatment (n=15). This design allowed the research team to compare the effects of the intervention on students for two different groups of teachers—randomly assigned teachers in their first year of PD and self-selected teachers in their second year of PD.