ABSTRACT
After a century of ignoring high school students at academic risk and as the standards movement emphasizes argument writing, supplemental literacy courses are needed. The authors used Design-Based Research to design a course for at-risk ninth graders and make recommendations for future research, such as including more school personnel than they did on design teams, working with teachers, asking broad research questions, and using data analysis methods in sync with the unit of analysis used in design. The authors revisit the whole class and individual case studies and consider what they offer future research on argument writing. The case studies revealed that students can recontextualize information across contexts into writing, that recontextualization occurs as part of community writing practices, and that it takes time to develop. If argument writing development is tied to activity, more attention than schools currently give to reading, writing, and discussion as knowledge building practices is needed, especially for students at academic risk.
