Writing across the curriculum
The call for writing instruction comes from many corners. The California Business Roundtable reported that the California State University system provides remedial training in reading, writing, or mathematics to two-thirds of its incoming freshmen at an estimated cost of $30 million per year.1 The College Board’s National Commission on Writing in the Schools and the Business Roundtable reported in 2004 that their members were spending more than $3 billion per year on remedial writing courses for their salaried and hourly employees.2
Dr. Douglas Reeves calls nonfiction writing one of the most powerful practices that impacts student achievement. The Rigor in the Classroom with Dr. Douglas Reeves professional learning activity explores achievement and student socioeconomic status, power standards, nonfiction writing, feedback and grading, and establishing a culture of achievement. Custom-designed exercises help educators (1) survey their current individual and school practices and (2) investigate ways to enhance practices that lead to rigor in the classroom.
In Results Now, researcher Michael Schmoker underscores the importance of writing as one of three aspects of literacy that includes reading, writing, and talking. Writing prepares students for every professional venture after high school. Schmoker laments that schools typically assign writing but do not teach it.3
A meta-analysis of research on effective instructional strategies led to the finding of 11 specific elements that will help improve the writing abilities of students. The elements are documented in Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High School. The report lists the following elements of an effective writing program for grades four to twelve:
- Writing strategies
- Summarization
- Collaborative writing
- Goals for a specific product
- Word processing
- Sentence combining
- Prewriting
- Inquiry activities
- Process writing
- Study of models
- Writing for content learning4
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Footnotes
1Closing Achievement Gaps at All Grade Levels; The Next Phase in Improving California’s Public Schools (PDF; Outside Source). Sacramento: California Business for Education Excellence, 2005, 3.
2Will Fitzhugh, "Latest Writing Report" (Outside Source), Education News, July 2005.
3Mike Schmoker, Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2006, 53, 62, and 95.
4Steve Graham and Dolores Perin, Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High School (PDF; Outside Source)—A Report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education, 2007, 11.
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