Helping Students with Disabilities Succeed in State and District Writing Assessments

While writing poses significant challenges for many students with disabilities, good teaching can help them overcome these barriers. The writing of students with disabilities typically contains more mechanical errors than that of their nondisabled peers and is less polished, expansive, coherent, and effective. Difficulties may exist because students with disabilities tend to:

• Know less than their peers about the characteristics of good writing.
• Begin writing with little or no planning.
• Limit revisions to minor corrections.
• Have problems with transcription processes (e.g., spelling, handwriting, punctuation).

To help students with disabilities perform at their best on writing assessments, teachers can use the following techniques:

• Use the three principles of effective writing instruction.
• Prepare students to participate in writing assessments.
• Use assistive technology in instruction and testing.
• Provide students with appropriate accommodations during testing and ensure that the accommodations correspond to those used during instruction.

Use the Three Principles of Effective Writing Instruction

Research shows that students with disabilities can be taught to write and to write better. This conclusion was borne out in a meta-analysis of research on teaching expressive writing to students with learning disabilities (Gersten, Baker & Edwards, 1999). [Meta-analysis is a way of quantitatively analyzing the results of many studies on a single topic in order to obtain an overall picture of research results on the topic.] Virtually all the interventions analyzed were multifaceted and involved students writing every day. Three principles were identified as being critical to effective writing instruction:

• Using a basic framework of planning, writing, and revision.
• Instructing students in steps of the writing process and the features and conventions of the writing genre.
• Providing feedback guided by the information explicitly taught.

One of many interventions that follow these principles is Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). Although researchers Karen Harris and Steve Graham designed SRSD for students with learning disabilities and other severe learning difficulties, students in general education also have been found to benefit. With SRSD, students are explicitly taught writing strategies and self-regulation procedures (e.g., goal-setting, self-monitoring, self- instruction, and self-reinforcement).

The goals of the SRSD approach are to

• Assist students in mastering the cognitive processes of planning, producing, revising, and editing written language.
• Help students further develop the capability to monitor and manage their own writing.
• Aid students in developing positive attitudes about writing and about themselves as writers.

Because many students have developed negative attitudes about their ability to write, teachers address student attitudes first. They help students understand that while writing does require effort, making the effort to learn and use the strategy will enable them to write. Then teachers follow a sequence to introduce and integrate the strategy and self-regulation components of SRSD: