The National Study of Writing Instruction - University at Albany

Participants
At each school site, participants included the principal and the department chairs or team
leaders for English, social science/ history, science, and math, as well as selected teachers of
these subjects at Grades 6, 8, 10, and 12. Field researchers sought to interview 1 teacher of
each of the 4 subjects at each of the target grade levels, and to observe at least 2 classes in
each grade level/subject combination.
In addition to those who were interviewed or observed, all teachers in each school were asked
to complete an online survey about writing and learning activities in their classes.
Table 7 summarizes the participants, by subject area and state. Across the 20 schools, 71
department or school administrators and 149 teachers of core subject areas participated in
interviews, 260 teachers allowed their classrooms to be observed, and 757 teachers
participated in an online survey. The survey had a 52.1% return rate overall, but there were
significant differences by school and state, with California being particularly low (13.7%).
In addition to administrators and faculty, field researchers in each school recruited a group of
focal students at each of the target grade levels, who were asked to save all of their schoolsponsored
writing in the 4 core subject areas over a full semester. Each student also
participated in an end-of-semester interview about their writing. At each grade level, focal
students were selected from a set of volunteers selected by the grade-level English teachers to
represent higher-achieving and lower-achieving students by school norms, as well as one
student designated as an English learner by state or district procedures, representing the
predominant second-language population in the school (assuming an ESL presence). To the
extent possible, these students were selected from different English classes. Table 8 shows
how the 138 students were distributed across states and achievement levels.
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