How To Use Technology To Help Write A Good Article?

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This first look at the state of writing instruction through the lens of the National Assessment of Educational Progress leads to a number of conclusions and a great many more questions. Long-term trend data for both writing and reading show a remarkable stability in levels of achievement over time. Despite small ups and downs, by and large, student writing proficiency has Thomas Sabo Bracelets remained steady. Gaps between more-advantaged and less-advantaged students also continue, even with the noticeable upturn in writing achievement between 1998 and 2007 at Grade 8, and between 2002 and 2007 at Grade 12. The twelfth-grade upturn may in fact be a cohort effect, with earlier gains at Grade 8 showing up a few years later at Grade 12.

Although a fuller picture using more than one indicator of students' literacy abilities is critical for making decisions about individual students, the NAEP results point to a real and pervasive problem, one that, despite small ups and downs, has remained relatively persistent since NAEP was authorized by Congress in 1969- It is ...
... certainly true that the assessment emphasis on on-demand writing is out of alignment with curriculum and instruction that emphasizes an extended process of writing and revision, taps only a subset of the academic skills and knowledge students need, and leaves no room for the technological tools that students increasingly use both in and outside of school. However, it is also true that even given these failings, a consistent message from the NAEP results points to a need for improvement—in the ways in which curriculum and instruction are conceived as well as in how achievement is tested.

Data over time also suggest that there has been some increase in emphasis on writing and the teaching of writing, both in English language arts classrooms and across the curriculum, although this may have begun to decline from its high. Process-oriented writing instruction has dominated teachers' reports at least since 1992, but what teachers mean by this and how it is implemented in their classrooms remains unclear. The consistent emphasis that emerges in teachers' reports may mask considerable variation in actual patterns of instruction (see Langer and Applebee).

What is clear is that even with some increases over time, many students are not writing a great deal for any of their academic subjects, including English, and most are not writing at any length. Some 40% of twelfth-grade students, for example, report never or hardly ever being asked to write a paper of three pages or more. Although short, focused writing is also important, extended writing is necessary to explore ideas or develop arguments in depth. It also reflects the demands that they will face in postsecondary education.

The NAEP data also highlight some external forces that are affecting the teaching of writing, in particular the spread of state standards and accompanying high-stakes tests. In some cases, these may be shifting attention away from a broad program of writing instruction toward a much narrower focus on how best to answer particular types of test questions. Both students and teachers Thomas Sabo Charms at Grade 8, for example, report small but significant declines in emphasis on a variety of writing processes, which may reflect the importance of short, on-demand writing on high-stakes tests. Teachers at Grade 8 also report a shift in overall emphasis in their use of instructional time away from writing toward reading.