Design principles for teaching effective writing : An introduction

Writing plays a key role in academic success and in an individual’s professional and social development. At the academic level, students have to fulfill multiple demands of written tasks in different content domains across the educational levels. In addition, writing skills are usually required to show students’ learning in exams or as tool to learn in content domains. Therefore, writing is an influential variable on students’ achievement. At the same time, in the current knowledge and information society, active participation in the community demands a certain level of writing proficiency more than ever. The increasing use of electronic devices that allow access to multiple social networks also requires proficient writing for effective use. In the same way, many writing skills are necessary in skilled jobs where memos, email communication, official reports, and so on are common. Further, across the grades and in many jobs, writing is an important vehicle for learning. For all of these reasons, achieving writing proficiency is a critical goal in today’s schools. Despite the importance of developing proficient writers, however, students’ writing performance is not meeting standards across many countries, including the us (nces, 2011), uk (Department of Education, 2012), Portugal (Festas et al., 2015), Australia (Department of Education, Training and Employment qld, 2013), Netherlands (Kühlemeier, Van Til, Feenstra, & Hemker, 2013), and others, although a comprehensive global picture is not yet available. Therefore, there is a need to identify empirically validated instructional practices to teach writing in schools.

Copyright © 2017. BRILL. All rights reserved.