With Common Core State Standards (CCSS), all students are held to the same high expectations, including students learning English and other learners who may have academic difficulties. Many students learning English have trouble writing and need effective writing strategies to meet the demands the standards present. Ten fourth and fifth grade students learning English (6 girls and 4 boys), whose home language was Spanish, participated in a multiple baseline design across three small groups of participants with multiple probes during baseline. In this study, self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) for opinion writing using students’ own ideas was evaluated. Students who participated in this study demonstrated an increase in: the number of persuasive elements (e.g. premise, reasons, elaborations, and conclusion) included in their essays, overall essay quality, and the number of linking words used when writing opinion essays using their own ideas. Additionally, students’ knowledge of the writing process and opinion-writing genre improved. Students found the instruction to be socially acceptable. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

High school students with high-incidence disabilities and struggling writers face considerable challenges when taking high-stakes writing assessments designed to examine their suitability for entrance to college. I examined the effectiveness of a writing intervention for improving these students’ performance on a popular college entrance exam, the writing assessment for the ACT. Students were taught a planning and composing strategy for successfully taking this test using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model. A randomized control trial was conducted where 20 high school students were randomly assigned to a treatment (N = 10) or control (N = 10) condition. Control students received ACT math preparation. SRSD instruction statistically enhanced students’ planning, the quality of their written text (including ideas and analysis, development and support, organization, and language use), the inclusion of argumentative elements in their compositions, and the use of transition words in written text. Limitations of the study, future research, and implications for practice are discussed.

Children with dyslexia have difficulty learning to read. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the use of simultaneous multisensory structured language (multisensory) instruction promoted better letter name and sound production, word reading, and word spelling for second grade children with typical development (TD; N=6) or with dyslexia (DYS; N=5) than structured language instruction alone. The use of non-English graphemes (letters) to represent two pretend languages were used to control for children’s lexical knowledge.

A multiple baseline, multiple probe across subjects single-case design, paired with an alternating treatments design, was used to compare the efficacy of multisensory and structure language interventions. Participant’s graphed data was visually analyzed and individual Tau-U and weighted Tau-U effect sizes were calculated for the outcome variables: letter name production, letter sound production, word reading, and word spelling.

Both interventions had an overall effect for participants with TD and DYS, though for individual participants intervention effects varied across outcome variables. However, the multisensory intervention did not provide a clear advantage over the structured intervention for participants with TD or DYS.