Women with metastatic breast cancer and significant psychological distress (N = 87) were assigned randomly to engage in four home-based sessions of expressive writing or neutral writing. Women in the expressive writing group wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings regarding their cancer, whereas women in the neutral writing group wrote about their daily activities in a factual manner. N...

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is an intelligent tutoring system that was developed to improve students’ writing proficiency; however, it remains relatively unclear whether and how this system promotes self-regulated learning. In previous studies, we have begun to investigate the characteristics of students’ self-assessments, as well as whether interactions with W-Pal can lead to more accurate self-as...

This study examines second language (L2) syntactic development in conjunction with the effects such development has on human judgments of writing quality (i.e., judgments of both overall writing proficiency and more fine-grained judgments of syntactic proficiency). Essays collected from 57 L2 learners in a longitudinal study were analyzed for growth and scoring patterns using syntactic complexi...

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students’ textbased writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students’ mastery of analytic textbased writing. Textbased writing tasks (N = 149) were collected from 27 fifthgrade teachers ...

This study investigates how variations in students’ trajectories within the tutoring system, Writing Pal, varied as a function of individual differences and ultimately related to changes in the quality and linguistic properties of prompt-based essays. Fortytwo college students interacted freely with the computerized writing tutor for approximately 4 hours. Using a novel statistical technique (r...

This study examined the effect of electronic outlining on the quality of students’ writing products and how outlining affects perceived mental effort during the writing task. Additionally, it was studied how students appropriate and appreciate an outline tool and whether they need explicit instruction in order to engage in planning. To answer these questions, the writing products and self-repor...

OBJECTIVE This study examined the relationship between ADHD and writing performance. METHOD Students in Grades 3 to 7, 84 with ADHD and 135 age- and gender-matched controls completed a writing task (including process logs), and measures of working memory and attention. RESULTS Students with ADHD wrote texts of similar length but with poorer structure, coherence, and ideation. In all, 6.7% o...