Graduate Project

Digital Guided Writing Instruction: A Resource Collection for Distance Learning

This project created a digital resource collection that provides virtually guided writing instruction to students in distance learning environments. The collection targets third-grade students and teachers and provides four lessons that instruct users on narrative, opinion, summary, and informational writing. The collection was created to address the lack of guided writing instruction that is available in a purely virtual format. The need for this kind of a curriculum arose as a result of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, districts around the world turned to distance learning as a temporary alternative to in-person instruction. With this unprecedented shift came a number of challenges as educators, districts, students, and parents were left with little to no time to adapt to these changes. As a consequence, traditional school hours were no longer accessible to all families due to their varied work schedules and home lives during the pandemic. This made live virtual instruction an inequitable solution for replacing in-person teaching. To address this constraint and the need for a more equitable form of guided writing instruction, a literature review was conducted on effective writing practices, learning with technology, and student motivation. These findings inspired the idea of creating a self-accessed, self-directed, self-paced, and predictive digital resource collection that meets the writing needs of students who are active members of a distance learning community. Since not enough research on distance learning currently exists to measure the effectiveness of this collection, future researchers can further the value of this project by evaluating it under the lens of future findings on remote learning.

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