Writing and Writing Difficulties From Primary Grades to College

In the world today, writing is an essential skill. At school, writing is often used to gauge students’ understanding of content material (Graham, 2008) as well as to promote the learning of it. Writing about what is read or presented in class helps youngsters gain a deeper understanding of such material (Bangert-Drowns, Hurley, & Wilkinson, 2004; Graham & Hebert, 2011). Writing has also become an integral ingredient at work, as employers of white-collar workers indicate they take into account how well one writes when hiring and promoting workers (National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, 2004). Moreover, 80% of blue-collar workers report that writing is part of their job (National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, 2005). In fact, one of us (Steve Graham) recently heard a police officer say that he had not drawn his firearm once in the last year but draws a pen every day as part of his job. Writing has even become ubiquitous in everyday life. Everywhere you look, people are texting, tweeting, and emailing as well as using writing to share and communicate the details, musings, and aspirations of their life via social websites like Facebook.

Students with learning disabilities (LD) and those at risk for writing difficulties are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to the use of writing at school, work, and home. In essence, when compared with their typically developing peers, these students experience considerable difficulty with almost every aspect of writing. In a meta-analysis that Graham, Collins, and Rigby-Wills (2015) just completed, it was found that the writing of students with LD when compared with their classmates contained fewer ideas; was more poorly organized; lacked basic structural elements; involved less diverse vocabulary; was less legible; included more errors involving spelling, grammar, and usage; and was of poorer overall quality. In addition, students with LD were less knowledgeable about writing and less motivated to write than their peers.

Although the field of LD has started to develop a reasonable foundation of knowledge about what and how students with LD and those at risk for LD write (Graham et al., 2015), and we have a reasonable start in identifying instructional practices that improve these students’ writing (see Gillespie & Graham, 2014; Rogers & Graham, 2008), our knowledge is neither deep nor broad. Although this special issue does not remedy this problem, it does bring together in a single space research on writing and students with writing disabilities. As with most other special issues of Learning Disability Quarterly, the five articles included in this special issue will be spread across two volumes.

In this volume, three studies on writing are presented. The remaining two will be presented in the next issue of Learning Disability Quarterly.

The lead article in the special issue involves a national survey examining the type of adaptations that primary grade teachers make for weaker writers in their classroom. This is important as instructional adaptations can increase or decrease struggling writers’ success at school. In this study, Graham and his colleagues asked teachers how frequently they made 20 different adaptations with their most vulnerable writers. Teachers were further asked to assess the acceptability of each of these adaptations in terms of effectiveness, preparedness to implement, time required to implement, possible negative side effects, and needed resources. Collectively, these aspects of acceptability were important predictors of how frequently teachers made adaptations for struggling writers, after variance due to teacher efficacy, classroom composition, and other factors were first controlled.

Writers and readers draw on overlapping pools of skills, processes, and knowledge to accomplish their aims (Shanahan & Lomax, 1986). As a result, it is generally assumed that writing and reading development as well as writing and reading disabilities are not independent. Unfortunately, there has been little research, especially longitudinal research, examining these assumptions. The second article in this special issue by Costas and colleagues addressed this gap and involved a longitudinal study with students in first to fourth grade to determine the rate of co-occurrence of writing and reading disabilities. They found that the co-occurrence of writing and reading disabilities increased from earlier to later grades and that a dual diagnosis resulted in a greater cognitive burden in both language and executive functioning.

Writing disabilities are not easily resolved or diminished. In fact, they commonly persist into adulthood (MacArthur & Philippakos, 2013). The persistence of writing difficulties has a number of potentially negative effects, including the possibility that they erode writers’ self-confidence and motivation. These adverse effects are rarely examined with older writers, partially because there is a lack of valid and reliable instruments for measuring them. MacArthur and colleagues took a step toward rectifying this situation in our third article, as they designed and validated with community college basic writers a measure of self-efficacy, achievement goals, beliefs, and affect.

In the next issue of Learning Disability Quarterly, the last two articles from this special issue will be published. The first by Graham and colleagues examines the adequacy of current procedures for identifying those who have a writing disability. This typically involves the use of a single writing measure (or sample of writing) to confirm that a student indeed has a writing disability. Applying generalizability theory, they found that multiple samples of writing are necessary to establish a reliable estimate of writing achievement.

Outside of school, digital writing tools are quite common. In the last several decades, researchers have examined the effects of moving these tools into the classroom, including whether they enhance the writing of students with LD (see Morphy & Graham, 2012). In recent years, these tools have moved from basic word processing programs to sophisticated web-based tools providing alternative means for composing as well as multiple supports to facilitate the writing process. Hall and colleagues developed such a tool and in the process, conducted a series of focus groups with middle school students, including youngsters with LD. These data were analyzed to expand our understanding of writing development as well as how digital tools can enhance writing instruction and writing production among typically developing writers and those with LD.

We hoped you enjoy the articles published in this special issue. We welcome comments and reactions. Email us at steve.graham@asu.edu and thall@cast.org.