SRSD: What and Why   

Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) research in writing began over 20 years ago with our concern about students who struggle to write, including students with disabilities. Writing is a highly complex, demanding process. The writer must negotiate the rules and mechanics of writing, while maintaining a focus on factors such as organization, form and features, purposes and goals, audience needs and perspectives, and evaluation of the communication between author and reader. Self-regulation of the writing process is critical; the writer must be goal-oriented, resourceful, and reflective. Skilled writers, and students who succeed at writing, are able to use powerful strategies to help them accomplish specific writing goals. Students who struggle at writing are not. Difficulties with narrative, persuasive, and informative writing have been well documented among students in our schools. Although children typically begin school with a positive attitude toward writing, this frequently deteriorates over the elementary school years. Writing can be even more problematic for students with learning disabilities or other severe learning problems. The writing of these students is less polished, expansive, coherent, and effective than that of their peers. Further, they often lack important knowledge of the writing process, experience difficulties generating ideas and selecting topics, do little or no advance planning, engage in knowledge telling, lack strategies for producing and organizing text, have difficulties with mechanics that interfere with the writing process, engage in little to no revision (primarily addressing mechanics), tend to overemphasize the role of mechanics in writing, and may overestimate their writing abilities. Academic failure, self-doubts, learned helplessness, maladaptive attributions, unrealistic pre-task expectancies, and poor motivation create a vicious cycle among students with severe learning problems and have also received a great deal of attention among researchers and teachers. Students with severe learning problems may also struggle with impulsivity, difficulties with memory or other aspects of information
processing, low task engagement and persistence, devaluation of learning, and low productivity. Thus, SRSD incorporates support and components aimed at helping students deal with these challenges as well. In fact, we began development of the SRSD approach in the early 1980's with the premise that children who face significant and often debilitating difficulties would benefit from an integrated approach to intervention that directly addressed their affective, behavioral, and cognitive characteristics, strengths, and needs. Further, these children will often need to be meaningfully engaged in more extensive, structured, and explicit instruction to develop skills, strategies (including self-regulation strategies), and understandings that their peers form more easily. 

Previous                                                       Main                                                                          Next