FUELing Effective Written Expression

Writing a cohesive, complete paragraph on one idea can be a challenging task for students with high-incidence disabilities who have writing instructional needs. Writing simultaneously requires complex skills (Kim et al., 2021), such as maintaining a single focus, generating and organizing ideas, and using appropriate vocabulary words while also following conventions and grammatical rules (Rodgers & Loveall, 2023). In addition to these more technical skills, students should be able to manage their efforts and strategically self-regulate their writing behaviors from planning and drafting, to revising, to editing to be effective writers. Students with high-incidence disabilities may experience challenges across these cognitive and affective processes related to writing compared to their peers without disabilities (Graham et al., 2017; Santangelo, 2014). For example, they may be less knowledgeable about writing genres, types of audiences, and different purposes for writing (Jagaiah et al., 2020). They are less skillful and strategic in planning, monitoring, and evaluating their own writing. Students may not independently engage in strategies such as prewriting or checking to make sure their written response includes the needed information for a writing task without instruction to do so. Consequently, their writing tends to be shorter, includes more irrelevant content and vocabulary, lacks organization, includes limited sentence structure with run-on sentences, and includes more grammatical errors (Graham et al., 2017; Santangelo, 2014). Yet writing can be supported in students with high-incidence disabilities with prewriting (or planning) strategies.