Intensifying Instruction to Meet Students’ Early Writing Needs

Abstract

With over 70% of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students in the United States scoring below proficiency levels in writing (NCES, 2009), teachers must provide early and effective writing intervention to accelerate students’ writing skills to meet grade-level standards. In this paper, we provide teachers with a theoretical framework to conceptualize the writing process, link evidenced-based writing interventions to each component of writing, and discuss how to create a writing instructional plan to individualize instruction. Then, we outline a data-based decision making process for intervention delivery. Our aim is to provide educators with steps to identify students’ writing needs, translate these needs into actionable teaching strategies, and accelerate writing progress for students who struggle to meet grade-level writing standards.

I Wrote Well Today: Practical Progress-Monitoring Approaches for Teachers of Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

“…For CBM-W, students write dictated words, evaluating students' word-level writing fluency (Lam et al, 2022), defined as the speed and accuracy in which students transcribe words in isolation. The CBM-PW tool allows students 1-5 minutes to write a sentence in response to a picture, measuring students' sentence-level writing fluency (Lam et al, 2022), defined as the speed and accuracy in which students generate and write sentences. The CBM-WE scoring mechanism measures students' discourse-level fluency, defined as the speed and accuracy with which students generate and write paragraphs.…”

“…However, evidence suggests that teachers continue to require support to engage in the DBDM/DBI process (Gesel et al, 2021), including DBDM/ DBI in writing (Lembke et al, 2018). To support teachers, several practitioner-oriented articles discuss DBDM/DBI in reading (Filderman & Toste, 2018), math (Powell & Stecker, 2014), social and emotional learning (Filderman et al, 2023), and writing (Lam et al, 2022;Poch et al, 2022). The present article is intended to further support the needs of teachers of students with EBD, who require a unique approach to writing instruction and a corresponding approach for monitoring progress.…”

Using Data-Based Individualized Adaptations to Enhance Tier 2 Social Skills Instruction

“…Adaptations to Tier 2 interventions are described in the research and practice literature and have been applied with both academic and behavioral interventions (Lam et al, 2022). For example, student progress in Check In/ Check Out (CICO), the most commonly used Tier 2 intervention (Bruhn et al, " Tier 2 interventions can be adapted to better address individual student needs.…”

“…Recently, researchers and practitioners have begun to consider whether Tier 2 interventions can be modified to increase their effectiveness (Wehby & Kern, 2014). That is, rather than moving nonresponders immediately to the more labor-intensive Tier 3 intervention, research illustrates the application of the process of data-based individualization (DBI; Lam et al., 2022) to adapt or modify Tier 2 interventions when students are not responding. In this article, we describe how to adapt social skills instruction (SSI), a common Tier 2 intervention, to increase its effectiveness.…”

Sentence Writing Intervention for At‐Risk Writers in Upper Elementary Grades

“…Teachers may then use published benchmarks and/or rates of growth to generate long-term goals and use graphed weekly CBM-W performance to visually track the student's progress toward their goal and modify instruction as needed. Although details for goal generation, graphing, and data-based decision making are beyond the scope of this article, we encourage readers to refer to Hosp et al (2016) and Lam et al (2021) for text resources, and to engage in the data-based instruction (DBI) professional learning series available through the National Center on Intensive Intervention (intensiveintervention.org).…”