Increasingly over the past five or six years we have focused our writing strategies research on reading-writing relations, and especially on how writing can be used to enhance reading comprehension. With his colleague Jaekyung Lee, Jim Collins recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences for a three-year study called "Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension" (WIRC) to examine the efficacy of using writing to improve reading comprehension in low-performing urban schools. In this research they are developing and testing strategies presented in the form of thinksheets--step-by-step guides to problem solving which teachers use interactively with students--to help fourth- and fifth-graders write about their reading. This research is developing and piloting the thinksheets, then testing and refining them, and finally conducting large-scale experiments to see if interactive and transactive writing during reading improves reading comprehension. Click here to see papers reporting the research of the WIRC grant.

Strategies for Struggling Writers is a book on strategic writing instruction for teachers in grades 6 through 13. A summary of the book can be viewed and a chapter of the book can be downloaded free from
Guilford Publications, Inc., the publisher of the book.

Book Summary
Chapter Excerpt