Programming for Students Who Struggle with Writing: How Strategy Instruction, Technology and Assessment can Promote Students’ Writing Improvement

Writing can be a challenging task for many people. Developing ideas, organizing them into an outline, spelling words, creating sentences with descriptive adverbs and adjectives, and making edits for a finessed final copy require an ability to manage these tasks concurrently to help make the ideas and phrases flow into a coherent text. For educators as well as governmental departments of education who create and manage yearly testing, there are many options for how writing can be assessed; assessment choices play a part in defining students who struggle with writing. This conceptual article discusses the challenges that students who struggle with writing face, technology tools that can help and how assessment of students' skills can be designed and applied to progress monitor (assess) writing content and quality over time. The conclusions of this article emphasize the benefits of employing research/evidence-based practices for writing with technology tools. The implications are that students who struggle with writing can benefit from step-by-step (strategy) instruction, progress monitoring their written content and quality skills as intervention programming sessions progress, and employing technology tools to help with idea generation, spelling, grammar/syntax, and revising ideas.