Classroom Writing Tasks and Students ’ Analytic Text - Based Writing

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students’ textbased writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students’ mastery of analytic textbased writing. Textbased writing tasks (N = 149) were collected from 27 fifthgrade teachers in an urban district, and teachers completed daily surveys (i.e., instructional logs) to assess the frequency of their reading and writing instruction (30–45 days total). Students (N = 793) completed a performance assessment of their textbased writing skills. Results showed that the large majority of writing tasks guided students to retrieve isolated facts or engage with surfacelevel features of texts in their writing (i.e., were of a low level of cognitive demand). The cognitive demand of textbased writing assignments predicted multiple features of students’ writing performance, including students’ ability to reason analytically about texts (effect size [ES] = .46), use evidence to support their claims (ES = .46), and organize their writing (ES = .35), even after controlling for other dimensions of literacy instruction. The quality (grist) of text to which students responded predicted one dimension of students’ writing performance, use of evidence to support their claims (ES = .37). Designing cognitively demanding textbased tasks should be considered an essential part of writing instruction reform and professional development programs for teachers that aim to increase students’ writing skills aligned to the Common Core. Writing is critical to academic and economic success (National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges [NCW], 2003). However, results of the National Assessment of Education Progress indicate that only about a quarter of students meet standards for proficient writing (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). Students who cannot write well are at a significant disadvantage. Beginning in the upper elementary grades, writing is a critical tool for developing thinking skills and subject matter content knowledge, as well as for expressing what one knows (BangertDrowns, Hurley, & Wilkinson, 2004; Hillocks, 1984, 2006). Adults who cannot write well often find college course work too difficult to complete, and face significant difficulty advancing in the workplace (Business Roundtable, 2009). That students struggle with writing is unsurprising, given that writing has long been a neglected area of the curriculum (NCW, 2003). Research shows that students are rarely asked to write in ways that require higher level thinking (Applebee & Langer, 2011; Gilbert & Graham, 2010). Gilbert and Graham found that students in grades Lindsay Clare Matsumura