Teaching writing to children who are underserved.

Writing instruction for children from low-income famiIies has been dominated by two antithetical views, one emphasizing component sills and drill-and-practice instruction, the other emphasizing natural processes of learning language. A third approach, one that reflects pedagogical principles that are based on a sociocognitive model of writing was investigated. Writing instruction that featured these principles in varying degrees was examined in 26 fourth-grade and 16 sixth-grade classrooms. Regression analysis indicated that more than 40% of the variance in children's posttest writing-quality scores was accounted for by degree of adherence to the model, and scores in writing mechanics did not suffer from application of the model