Abstract
When researchers and educators talk and teach about the area of writing, there is no doubt that Dr. Steve Graham will be included in these discussions. His research and contributions to the field of writing are exceptional, to say the least. This interview began with how he became interested in writing, his thoughts on the definition and identification of dysgraphia, teaching strategies and interventions for handwriting difficulties, and areas of writing that could be explored in future research.
Dr. Steve Graham is a Regents Professor and the Warner Professor in the Division of Leadership and Innovation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, where he has been a faculty member since 2012. In his early years in academia, Dr. Graham was on the faculty at Auburn University and Purdue University before spending 22 years at the University of Maryland. He then spent 7 years as the Currey Ingram Chair in the Department of Special Education at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Graham studies the development of writing, writing instruction, and the interconnections between reading and writing. His research includes both typically developing and struggling writers.
Dr. Graham is the author, editor, co-author, or co-editor of 24 books and 135 book chapters on writing research, and has published more than 335 journal articles on topics such as handwriting, spelling, and written expression instruction and practice, strategies to improve reading skills, and the effects of writing in other subject areas. Dr. Graham is the former editor of Exceptional Children, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Journal of Writing Research, Focus on Exceptional Children, and Journal of Educational Psychology, and is the co-author of the “Handbook of Writing Research,” “Handbook of Learning Disabilities,” and “APA Handbook of Educational Psychology.” Dr. Graham is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Thorndike Career Award from Division 15 of the American Psychological Association, Sylvia Scribner Award from Division C of the American Educational Research Association, William S. Gray citation of merit from the International Literacy Association, John S. Nesbit Fellowship from the British Educational Research Association, Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education from Division K of the American Educational Research Award, Career Research Award (with Karen Harris) from the International Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), the Kauffman-Hallahan Distinguished Researcher Award (with Karen Harris) from the Division of Research (CEC), Jeannette Fleischner Career Leadership Award from the Division of Learning Disabilities (CEC), Samual A. Kirk Award from the Division of Learning Disabilities (CEC), and the J. Lee Weiderholt Lecture Award from the Council of Learning Disabilities.
Dr. Graham’s leading contributions to the field of writing and literacy, more broadly, are recognized internationally, as evidenced by his experience as a visiting professor and fellow at universities such as the University of Regensburg (Germany), the University of Andrés Bello in Chile, and the Australian Catholic University. It was a pleasure speaking with Dr. Graham, and I look forward to studying and continuing his work throughout my research and teaching career.
How did you get into the field of writing? What drew you to the topic?
I started my career as a special education teacher. I worked with children who were identified as having learning disabilities or emotional problems, and almost all of them had reading difficulties. I was interested in reading and didn’t care about writing. When I started my doctorate, I minored in reading because I didn’t feel my master’s program had taught me enough about how to teach reading. I did a dissertation that involved miscue analysis. There were probably around 80 similar studies at that time. It differed from the other studies in that it had a developmental perspective and involved children with special needs. One of my committee members told me something you don’t want to hear, but I think she was right. She said I could have done better. After thinking about it, I agreed. I realized that my interest had shifted to writing because I had to write a lot as a student.
I’ve never really considered myself a good writer. I had to think about it. I was reading The Paris Reviews, which are interviews with famous writers, and they were focused on the process. That is when I realized what I was interested in was writing. That’s probably not what you want to find out at the end of your dissertation, because that meant I was going to switch my focus. I spent 3 years writing reviews. Because I was interested in special needs and a lot of children with special needs have handwriting or spelling problems, one review was historically and instructionally oriented on handwriting, one on spelling, and one on composition in general. I worked on them in part to get an overview and a structure for how to think about the area. So, it was driven by the fact that I was actually having to write, and I was now interested in what that meant. I have always loved reading, and it was happenstance that I was reading The Paris Reviews. If they would have been about another topic, I probably wouldn’t have been as interested in writing. It was interesting enough to me that I’m still interested in writing and reading connections 40-something years later. However, writing is one that rattles my boat.
That’s similar to my situation. When I was a special education teacher, we mostly focused on reading. I realized that not much research has been conducted in the area of writing. We were not taught the background of writing or strategies for teaching it. I started going down a rabbit hole once my son was identified with dysgraphia.
I have to say, when I started, there was virtually no research on children with special needs and writing. There were studies that might look at handwriting legibility in children with and without special needs, but intervention studies were far and few between. It’s not that writing and writing interventions weren’t studied by people in general, but there was hardly anything that included children with high-incidence special needs.
Yes, there is still a lot we can learn about the development of writing through a special education lens. Considering everything you have accomplished in your career, what do you think are your most important contributions to the field?
I suspect my most important contributions are the reviews and meta-analyses I have done. Such papers tend to be cited and read more often than individual studies. I would be fine if this is the case, as most of these reviews focus on how to teach writing effectively. I am also hopeful that the Writer(s)-Within-Community model I developed will have staying power, but more importantly, lead to others reconsidering how we think about writing.
The next question I had was, if you were to define dysgraphia, what would you consider dysgraphia to be? There are multiple definitions and perspectives floating around.
You know, I hate this question. It’s like the dyslexia question in a way. The basic idea behind the exia phenomena, whether we’re talking about dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia, is unexpected problems in one or more areas. Unexpectedness is usually thought of as what capabilities the child should have, whether we determine that from intelligence or in some other way. They’re doing well in other subjects, but not this one. The reason for their struggle is that there is some kind of faulty wiring or dysfunction that is going on in the brain, and we can practically never diagnose that. With something like writing, we have very few studies on the brain.
Using MFRIs would be too expensive, and we wouldn’t really know what we were looking at. Think about saying the child has difficulty with handwriting/spelling/writing, and there seems to be something going on in the brain that is unusual. We can’t say that last part. I’m a skeptic when this term is used. I get parents who want to talk with me about their children and want to know more about their children’s problems. I’ll ask who did the diagnosis, what their understanding is of what they did in the assessments, etc. What it usually comes down to is either one of two things: (a) their child has handwriting, spelling, or general writing difficulties, or (b) their child’s writing isn’t aligned with their academic/intelligence range. It’s either one or both of those together. I guess I’d ask you, in terms of your child’s diagnosis: How was that done? What’s your understanding of it?
They assessed his handwriting, spacing, alignment, letter formations, speed, and conventions. They also measured his motor abilities, other academic skills, and intelligence. His handwriting just wasn’t what it should be for his age and capability.
So, it’s a normative comparison thing. And like you said, definitions for dysgraphia/handwriting disabilities are not consistent. If we use those three things I mentioned [handwriting, spelling, writing], there are problems with handwriting. That’s being measured as to where it is compared with other children, and usually, you can tell right away by looking at the handwriting. You see these children’s handwriting, and it’s obvious. Usually, what we don’t know is the confirmation of the unexpectedness or if there’s some neurological problem. So what you end up doing is working on the handwriting difficulty. That’s what you focus on. The other part of this is usually that if you have handwriting difficulties and you’re young, it probably is a harbinger of other difficulties with writing. Take my daughter, for example. She hates writing because of the difficulties she has with handwriting and spelling. She’s a good writer, but she doesn’t like it. She would make a “u” like this [physical demonstration]. It was like she drew every letter, and it took her forever to write. While she wasn’t illegible in terms of what she wrote, she was very slow when writing. In terms of holding ideas in working memory, the idea or plan for the next thing you’re going to say may slip away, in whole or in part. It affects planning and content generation. It is kind of a ripple effect, and the slower you are, the more problems you’ll have. Also, if your writing can’t be read, then it’s a problem on the other end. People make judgments about the quality of what you say based on the legibility of your writing. In fact, it’s a strong effect, a full standard deviation effect in terms of people’s judgment about the quality of the text. Handwriting, whether legibility or speed, can have a cascading impact on other things, such as the amount of text generated. Hence, when we use the term dysgraphia in a precise way, like to discuss handwriting, there could be other writing difficulties in play as well.
In summary, my take is I would rather say here’s what a child does well, normatively, and here are challenges for them, or areas that need improvement. To add to that, here are the reasons why the future will be affected if we don’t improve the child’s particular areas. I take a very functional approach. Now, do I think labels are useful? They can be. If it’s a matter of getting services, they definitely can be useful. I was reading something today about being positive about the quirkiness and differences of people. At the same time, we don’t want to use that as a bludgeon or criticism. We need to recognize individual differences and be clear about what a child does well and what might get in the way. We can help a child to move beyond their struggles, whether it’s a movement to word processing or something else. Sometimes it’s not that you keep working on handwriting until they’re in 12th grade. Sometimes in second grade, that was where our daughter was, you make a move forward. I’m very functional in talking about characteristics. If somebody says Johnny is X or Sally is Y, what does that mean in terms of how they defined their characteristics? I think in your child’s case, it’s a functional approach, even if they use the term dysgraphia.
With the increase in research on dyslexia, we have been able to start pinpointing areas (i.e., phonological awareness/processing, orthographic skills, and language skills) to evaluate and look at for more accurate identification. What areas and characteristics should be focused on when identifying dysgraphia?
I would say that we want to assess handwriting, spelling, sentence construction, and overall quality of writing. We should also examine how students plan and revise their writing.
I will now transition our interview to the discussion on writing instruction and interventions. My short-term goal is to create a single-case writing intervention to determine if adding motor activities, such as those an occupational therapist may provide in therapy, increases the rate of progress when added to explicit handwriting instruction. In the broader scope, my long-term goal is to evaluate the efficacy of the single-case intervention within a sizable cohort, employing experimental design methodologies. Ultimately, my overarching goal with these studies is to provide research-based instructional solutions that teachers can use with students at risk or with writing difficulties. What are your thoughts on the prevalence of researching writing interventions within the domain of special education?
I’ll tell you what’s not been done. I haven’t done a review of experimental studies in handwriting since 2016. What I can tell you (at that point in time), and I don’t think this has changed, is that there have not been many studies conducted where handwriting is focused and taught for each specific child. It’s very time-consuming to individualize every lesson for every student. For example, we conducted a study where we clustered letters together. I think I remember that we worked on those three times a week for 20 minutes. The children got the same instruction, whether that letter was difficult for them or not. That’s inefficient. It’s efficient in terms that we could work with a small group, but it was inefficient in the sense that some children were working on things they didn’t need to work on. Therefore, there is a need for more individualization on the teaching end and for looking at the effectiveness of teaching this way.
What are your thoughts on how K-12 instruction has incorporated best practices to develop writing skills in students with high-incidence disabilities?
I wish I could say that we can hang out the flag, declare victory, and call it a day. Instead, our surveys and interviews with teachers suggest there is much more to do. Most teachers do not feel prepared to teach writing to students with high-incidence disabilities. In an observational study we are doing now, I am not seeing the application of evidence-based practice for teaching writing to these students by either general or special education teachers. While this latter observation may not be representative, we need to do a better job of making high-quality writing instruction a part of every classroom.
You previously mentioned moving on and not working on handwriting as much. For example, writing using a word processor. What are some other approaches that may be appropriate to assist with text generation? Identifying these other approaches can provide us with major opportunities to advance writing interventions for students who might struggle with writing by personalizing their intervention practices.
I don’t want to say that you abandon handwriting instruction. There are a couple of possible solutions or different ways of approaching this issue. One way is that you can take a very individualistic approach and identify the letters that are particularly malformed or written slowly, and work specifically on those. And of course, depending upon what the problem is, if it’s legibility issues due to spacing, size, alignment, etc., those can be worked on individually as well.
We can also work on fluency in one or two ways. Having children write more increases fluency. Doing exercises where they copy something with an increase in the goal can do that. There’s not a lot of evidence on this next approach, but it’s worth a try. Let’s say that you teach children to write in manuscript, and your school doesn’t teach cursive. There was a study that looked at manuscript and cursive writing and their relation. What it may suggest is that writers who struggle with manuscript writing may be more successful with another form of writing, like cursive or italics. Having a “leave the old problem behind” perspective. Now the new form of writing may have the same problem, or it may not. Sometimes children get stuck in that “I can’t do this” feeling. Responding by trying something else may alleviate that feeling. If you switch to a word processor, you must teach typing until students can type as quickly as they can create letters. Typing is not necessarily a better solution.
Another thing that can help is teaching to plan in advance. Typically, children who have trouble with handwriting or writing in general plan as they are writing. This can interfere with the writing process and can be addressed, in part, by making plans for what you’re going to say in advance. As children get older, speech-to-text synthesis may be an option. Previously, technology was difficult for this. You would have to say a word, pause, say a word, pause, and so on. That’s a horrible solution. But technology has improved. So, this approach provides another solution, but it also presents other challenges. The challenge with something like speech-to-text synthesis is that the tendency is just to say whatever comes into your mind. There was a study done in the 1950s investigating expert dictators. What they found was that people who use dictaphones spent 60% of their composing time planning what to say with notes and other things. We find that with children with learning disabilities, we also need to teach them to plan for writing when using dictation, as with writing by hand. As you can see, there are multiple ways that this problem can be either circumvented, lessened, or addressed instructionally.
After considering what the writing field looked like when you started your career and where it is now, where do you hope the field is headed in the future?
I hope that writing will become an integral part of schooling, with more time devoted to teaching writing and students spending more time writing. I hope writing will be seen as the responsibility of all teachers, and that we do a better job of preparing teachers to teach this complex skill. Finally, I hope we find creative ways to use AI so that all students can thoughtfully and strategically apply this as a tool to help them become better writers. This will require us to rethink what learning to write means, as it will involve an increasing collaboration between humans and AI.
Building on the last question, what other areas of writing difficulties do you feel need more research?
We just finished a large meta-analysis (Graham et al., 2023) looking at any writing outcome for 6th to 12th-grade students. The goal of the study was to determine if teaching writing to secondary students improved their writing and reading, and if so, what strategies were effective. The study was funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences (Award number R305C190007). We found 406 comparisons (experimental or quasi-experimental design studies testing the writing and reading outcomes of various writing treatments of secondary students). While all writing and reading outcomes were considered collectively, some specific outcomes included were writing quality, transcription skills, writing process, organization, reading achievement, and reading comprehension (Graham et al., 2023). We’re doing the same thing at the elementary level, but we’re still finishing the coding. If you’re talking about children with special needs, I think one of the things that’s been under-examined is using writing and reading together to support each other. There have been studies exploring whether reading is improved after teaching writing, and vice versa. The answer to that is yes. But when you look at the studies, they’re almost always with children who are typically developing. What we could explore is combining spelling (writing) and decoding (reading) instruction, asking to what extent we can optimize the amount of time that’s spent on spelling and decoding combined, and has the potential to benefit both. In other words, for optimal instruction, we could study if you’re doing this in writing, do you also apply that knowledge to your reading, or vice versa. One of the things I’m hoping that we’ll see happen for curricular development in the upcoming years is that we’ll see more direct connections between reading and writing. Before this can be fully developed, there needs to be testing of those connections, whatever they are, with children who find reading and/or writing a challenge.
Vocabulary instruction and how it relates to writing is another area that needs more research. We know about teaching vocabulary and its impacts on reading outcomes (e.g., reading comprehension). There are multiple ways to teach vocabulary within the context of writing. We could study traditional vocabulary instruction, where we teach the children vocabulary words, and see if there’s an improvement in their writing. We can also work on writing in a particular subject area, like science. For example, we introduce words that are related to outer space. A study like this has been conducted and found that learning vocabulary is a boon to your writing.
How to improve motivation in writing is an area we do not know enough about. We know quite a bit about motivation in general, but not in the context of writing. In the meta-analysis we conducted (Graham et al., 2023), we did not find that the motivational studies conducted enhanced writing in any way, and writing interventions didn’t tend to have much of an effect on motivational outcomes. I think that’s because most of the available studies included multiple variables. It might be that you can enhance motivation by having mastery-oriented instruction where students can see their progress. They have instructions that should help them do something well. Then, they evaluate how they did on that task with feedback from the teachers. My guess is you’ll see improvements in efficacy for writing and possibly other motivation aspects as well.
The last topic area is emulating models. We have studies, but most of those give children models of writing and say here’s a good model with a brief look at it. There’s no real discussion/study of those models or instruction around them. Modeling has effects, but they’re generally weak. I think they could be much stronger. We may find that students’ writing improves if you look at strong models and talk about what made this a good piece of writing. In contrast, also looking at weaker models and discussing what makes them poor would contribute to analyzing the aspects of the modeled writing.
There’s a lot that needs to be done, whether we’re talking about children with special needs or not, but there are some areas that really stand out. Those are the areas that I think are particularly problematic.
To finish up the interview, who were some of the greatest influences on your career?
My writing muse is John Hayes. His work on cognitive models of writing was the springboard from which Karen Harris and I began our work. Anytime John published something, I was all over it to see what new insights I could obtain. In terms of role models, Don Deshler from the University of Kansas cannot be beat. He was always focused on how to help students with learning disabilities become more successful and better learners. He never put himself first, but always concentrated on the needs of others: students and colleagues. Finally, whatever I have accomplished in the last 45 years would not have been possible without my wife and colleague Karen Harris. She is the real brains behind the curtain.
Thank you so much for this pleasant interview. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.
I’m more than glad to. Anytime in the future you want to talk, just let me know.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was supported, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (H325D210073). Views expressed herein are those of the authors and have neither been reviewed nor approved by the granting agencies.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.