ABSTRACT
Julie A. Washington, Lee Branum-Martin, Ryan Lee-James, and Congying Sun tackle an enormous set of issues in their landmark longitudinal study of language and reading skills among African American boys and girls from first to fifth grades. They find no gender differences in this large accelerated cohort design for language and cognition. The disparities in writing between girls and boys, and between African Americans and other children, are some of those facts that need to be examined and changed. Steve Graham, Karen R. Harris, and Keith Beard disaggregate data from previous interventions on writing and find that the use of evidence-based writing instruction that incorporated known strategies for planning, revising, sentence construction, spelling, handwriting, and self-regulation improved the writing performance of African American males who were having difficulties in writing.
