Taking Charge: Adolescents with Learning Disabilities Assume Responsibility for Their Own Writing

Abstract

Adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) often find expository writing among the most difficult academic skills to master. These students typically experience a great deal of failure with writing and become dependent upon others — mainly the teacher — for ideas and “quality control.” Such dependence on external sources hinders the development of higher-level cognitive skills required of effective writers. This study examined how a powerful writing strategy, Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing (CSIW), helped enable a group of seventh-graders with LD to take over responsibility for their own writing performance and to scaffold one another's writing development. Extensive teacher modeling and scaffolding, collaboration throughout the writing process, and a set of structuring think-sheets enabled these students to move beyond the “learned helplessness” so common among adolescents with learning disabilities; they came to see themselves as genuine writers and to employ the writing process as a tool for effective written expression.

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