Explore the vast range of titles available.

This meta-analysis examined if students writing about content material in science, social studies, and mathematics facilitated learning (k = 56 experiments). Studies in this review were true or quasi-experiments (with pretests), written in English, and conducted with students in Grades 1 to 12 in which the writing-to-learn activity was part of instruction. Studies were not included if the control condition used writing to support learning (except when treatment students spent more time engaging in writing-to-learn activities), study attrition exceeded 20%, instructional time and content coverage differed between treatment and control conditions, pretest scores approached ceiling levels, letter grades were the learning outcome, and students attended a special school for students with disabilities. As predicted, writing about content reliably enhanced learning (effect size = 0.30). It was equally effective at improving learning in science, social studies, and mathematics as well as the learning of elementary, middle, and high school students. Writing-to-learn effects were not moderated by the features of writing activities, instruction, or assessment. Furthermore, variability in obtained effects were not related to features of study quality. Directions for future research and implications for practice are provided. [Author abstract]

This study examined the nature and frequency of error in high school native English speaker (L1) and English learner (L2) writing. Four main research questions were addressed: Are there significant differences in students’ error rates in English language arts (ELA) and social studies? Do the most common errors made by students differ in ELA and social studies? Are there significant differences in the error rates between L1 and L2 students in ELA? Do L1 and L2 students differ in how frequently they make the most common errors in ELA? Written work of 10th and 12th grade students in five states was collected. The sample included 178 essays (120 in ELA and 58 in social studies) from 67 students (33 10th graders and 34 12th graders; 49 native English speaking students and 18 English learners). Results indicate that there were significant differences in the frequencies of errors between ELA and social studies, with higher error rates in social studies. In addition, L2 writers had significantly higher error rates than L1 writers in ELA. Aside from a few types of errors (spelling, capitalization, and some punctuation errors), most types of errors appear relatively infrequently in school-sponsored writing. Moreover, the eight most common errors accounted for a little more than half of all errors, and these did not differ significantly between ELA and social studies writing or between L1 and L2 writers.

In the present study, we developed a chatbot that helps teachers to deliver writing instructions. By working with the chatbot, the post-secondary writers developed a thesis statement for their argumentative essay outlines, and the chatbot helped the writers to refine their peer review feedback. We conducted a preliminary analysis of the effect of a chatbot on these writers' writing achievement. We also collected several student testimonials about their chatbot experiences. Several important pedagogical and research implications for chatbot-guided writing instructions and the use of learning technology have been addressed.

This cluster randomized controlled trial investigated the impact of project-based learning with professional development supports on social studies and literacy achievement and motivation of second-grade students from low–socioeconomic status school districts. At random in within-school pairs, 48 teachers were assigned to the experimental or comparison group. Experimental group teachers were asked to teach four project-based learning units designed to address nearly all social studies and some literacy standards. Comparison group teachers were asked to teach social studies as they normally would except to teach a target number of lessons. The experimental group showed higher growth in social studies and informational reading but not writing or motivation. Greater consistency with project-based learning session plans was associated with higher growth in writing, motivation, and reading.

This study explored the extent to which an 18-day history and writing curriculum intervention, taught over the course of one year, helped culturally and academically diverse adolescents achieve important disciplinary literacy learning in history. Teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship form of instruction for the integration of historical reading and writing strategies and content learning with the goal of improving students' historical argument writing. The intervention had positive and significant results for each writing outcome. After controlling for variables associated with students' incoming abilities, the researchers found moderate to large effects for all participants. Relative to basic readers in the control condition, those participating in the intervention scored higher in historical writing and writing quality and wrote longer essays; these results translate into effect sizes of .45 on basic readers' historical writing, .32 on their overall writing quality, and .60 on the length of their papers. Teachers implemented the reading and writing curriculum intervention with high levels of implementation fidelity, leading the researchers to explore additional factors that contributed to students' success after accounting for teacher effectiveness. The results indicate further benefits dependent on the degree to which students completed the curriculum.

The shifting emphases of new national curricula have placed more attention on knowledge generation approaches to learning. Such approaches are centered on the fundamental sense of generative learning where practices and tools for learning become the focus of the learning environment, rather than on the products of learning. This paper, building on from the previous review by Fiorella and Mayer (2015, 2016), focuses on a systematic review of doctoral and master theses of a knowledge generation approach to the learning of science called the science writing heuristic (SWH) approach. The outcomes of examining 81 theses show that students regardless of grade levels and cultural settings were significantly advantage in terms of content knowledge, critical thinking growth, and representational competency. The results also indicate that time in terms of engagement with the approach is critical for achieving student outcomes and for teachers to develop expertise with the approach. Questioning was also noted as being critical. Implications arising from the study are centered on the development and use of writing, the need for interactive dialogical environments, and the importance of questioning as critical elements for success.

Situated within the historical and current state of writing and adolescent literacy research, this systematic literature review screened 3504 articles to determine the prevalent themes in current research on writing tasks in content-area classrooms. Each of the 3504 studies was evaluated and coded using seven methodological quality indicators. The qualitative synthesis of studies is organized by the overarching categories of context, cognition, and content. The studies are further grouped by relevant themes to explore how the incorporation of writing tasks into content-area instruction benefits the secondary students' content-area learning and knowledge acquisition. Primary themes include the elements of explicit strategy and inquiry-based instruction, the impact of prewriting models, the role of metacognition and journaling, and the writing-related implications for content-area assessment. Recommendations for future research are offered. Additionally, practical implications for secondary contentarea teachers are presented.

Background Large language models like ChatGPT have revolutionized the field of natural language processing with their capability to comprehend and generate textual content, showing great potential to play a role in medical education. This study aimed to quantitatively evaluate and comprehensively analysis the performance of ChatGPT on three types of national medical examinations in China, including National Medical Licensing Examination (NMLE), National Pharmacist Licensing Examination (NPLE), and National Nurse Licensing Examination (NNLE). Methods We collected questions from Chinese NMLE, NPLE and NNLE from year 2017 to 2021. In NMLE and NPLE, each exam consists of 4 units, while in NNLE, each exam consists of 2 units. The questions with figures, tables or chemical structure were manually identified and excluded by clinician. We applied direct instruction strategy via multiple prompts to force ChatGPT to generate the clear answer with the capability to distinguish between single-choice and multiple-choice questions. Results ChatGPT failed to pass the accuracy threshold of 0.6 in any of the three types of examinations over the five years. Specifically, in the NMLE, the highest recorded accuracy was 0.5467, which was attained in both 2018 and 2021. In the NPLE, the highest accuracy was 0.5599 in 2017. In the NNLE, the most impressive result was shown in 2017, with an accuracy of 0.5897, which is also the highest accuracy in our entire evaluation. ChatGPT’s performance showed no significant difference in different units, but significant difference in different question types. ChatGPT performed well in a range of subject areas, including clinical epidemiology, human parasitology, and dermatology, as well as in various medical topics such as molecules, health management and prevention, diagnosis and screening. Conclusions These results indicate ChatGPT failed the NMLE, NPLE and NNLE in China, spanning from year 2017 to 2021. but show great potential of large language models in medical education. In the future high-quality medical data will be required to improve the performance.

Since 2006, literacy skills have been mandated as an integral part of all subject areas at all levels (grades 1–13) in Norwegian schools. With the exception of reading, evaluation reports show that teaching in general seems to be little affected by this reform. During the last few years, however, there has been a noticeable growth in interest in writing in the content areas. The article presents quantitative and qualitative data from a network of secondary schools that have established cross-curricular school-based writing projects. Teachers in these schools meet regularly, sharing experiences about students’ writing and ways of organizing writing sessions. While they had to deal with differences in subject-specific text norms, they discovered similarities across subject areas they could work collectively on. A major effect for the participants was the development of a broader instruction repertoire and more goal-related use of scaffolding strategies in the classroom, most of which was in accordance with a process approach to writing. We discuss these data in the light of similar studies in Norway and abroad, and we highlight some reflections about implications for practice.