Writing and science connections : integrated instruction and assessment

Learning to write is a daunting task for many young children. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a combined approach to writing instruction and assessment on the writing performance of students in two grade 3 classes. Five forms and traits of writing were purposefully connected during writing lessons while exhibiting links to the four strands of the grade 3 Ontario science curriculum. Students then had opportunities to engage in the writing process and to self-assess their compositions using either student-developed (experimental group/teacher-researcher's class) or teachercreated (control group/teacher-participant's class) rubrics. Paired samples t-tests revealed that both the experimental and control groups exhibited statistically significant growth from pretest to posttest on all five integrated writing units. Independent samples t-tests showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group on the persuasive + sentence fluency and procedure + word choice writing tasks. Pearson product-moment correlation r tests revealed significant correlations between the experimental group and the teacher-researcher on the recount + ideas and report + organization tasks, while students in the control group showed significant correlations with the teacher-researcher on the narrative + voice and procedure + word choice tasks. Significant correlations between the control group and the teacher-participant were evident on the persuasive + sentence fluency and procedure + word choice tasks. Qualitative analyses revealed five themes that highlighted how students' self-assessments and reflections can be used to guide teachers in their instructional decision making. These findings suggest that educators should adopt an integrated writing program in their classrooms, while working with students to create and utilize purposeful writing assessment tools.

Youth Involvement in Organizational Decision Making: The Connection to Youth Initiative and Organizational Functioning

Studying positive adolescent development requires an examination of the mutually beneficial associations between youth and their environment. These youthcontext relations include both the contributions that youth make to others and society and the youth-context interactions that might predict positive youth outcomes. Community and youth-serving organizations, where youth may be involved in decision-making roles such as service delivery, advocacy, or on boards of directors, can provide one important context for youth contributions and for positive adolescent development. Research on the outcomes of youth involvement in organizational decision-making, however, is limited, and largely consists of exploratory qualitative studies. This dissertation is formatted as an integrated article dissertation. It begins with a review of the literature on contexts of structured youth activities and positive youth development. This review is intended to describe theory on development-context relations, in which development is considered an interactive process that occurs between individuals and their contexts, as it pertains the positive development of youth who are involved in various structured activities (e.g., volunteering). This description follows with a review of current research, and conclusions and rationale for the current studies. Following this theoretical and research background, the dissertation includes reports of two studies that were designed to address gaps in the research on youth involvement in organizational decision-making. The first was a qualitative research synthesis to elucidate and summarize the extant qualitative research on the outcomes of youth involvement in organizational decision making on adults and organizations. Results of this study suggested a number of outcomes for service provision, staff, and broader organizational functioning, including both benefits to organizations as well as some costs. The second study was a quantitative analysis of the associations among youth involvement, organizations' learning culture, and youth initiative, and relied on survey data gathered from adults and youth in community-based organizations with youth involvement. As expected, greater youth involvement in organizational decision making was associated with higher learning culture within the organization. Two dimensions of youth involvement, greater program engagement and relationships with adults, were related to greater youth initiative. A third dimension, sense of ownership, was not- .-.- associated with youth's level of initiative. Moreover, the association between relationships with adults and youth initiative was only significant in organizations with relatively low learning culture. Despite some limitations, these studies contribute to the research literature by providing some indication of the potential benefits and costs of youth involvement and by making an important contribution toward the early stages of context-level analyses of youth development. Findings have important implications for practitioners, funders, future research, and lifespan development theory.