uring the past 15 years, an imt
pressive number of intervention
research studies in the area
of expressive writing have been conducted
with students with learning
disabilities (LD). Whereas earlier studies
focused predominantly on writing
mechanics and grammar, more recent
studies have addressed ways to improve
writing content.
This shift was influenced by the development
of cognitive models of writing
that emphasized the mental operations
employed by skilled writers
(Hayes & Flower, 1986; Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 1986). Skilled writers devote a
good deal of time to planning, revising,
monitoring, evaluating, and managing
the writing process (Graham & Harris,
2002). In teaching writing to students
with LD, research efforts have shifted
to identifying methods for developing
these writing strategies and processes.
Writing research has also been influenced
by Hillocks’s (1984) metaanalysis
of writing instruction. Hillock
found that effective writing lessons
had clear and specific objectives and
prepared students to write about specific
topics. Effective writing instruction
was characterized by planned
brainstorming activities that helped
students organize information prior to
writing.
Hillocks’s (1984) meta-analysis noted
that older writing activities, such as
combining simple sentences into more
complex sentences, were much less effective
than the integrated series of
lessons that traversed the entire writing
process. Even less effective were
methods in which students merely wrote a good deal of text with minimal
guidance from a teacher or attempted
to emulate features of good writing
found in the work of others. Least effective
were approaches that focused
on studying parts of speech and sentence
fragments.
In addition to Hillocks’s metaanalysis
and the emerging emphasis on the strategic nature of writing, several
other reasons contributed to the
generation of this body of high-quality
research. Many researchers viewed
writing instruction as one of the few
aspects of special education instruction
in which teachers could help students
learn to express their own ideas effectively.
Expository writing allows
students to demonstrate their unique
perspectives on-and understanding
of-social, political, and historical issues
(Gersten & Baker, 2001).