Adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) often find expository writing among the most difficult academic skills to master. These students typically experience a great deal of failure with writing and become dependent upon others — mainly the teacher — for ideas and “quality control.” Such dependence on external sources hinders the development of higher-level cognitive skills required of effective writers. This study examined how a powerful writing strategy, Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing (CSIW), helped enable a group of seventh-graders with LD to take over responsibility for their own writing performance and to scaffold one another's writing development. Extensive teacher modeling and scaffolding, collaboration throughout the writing process, and a set of structuring think-sheets enabled these students to move beyond the “learned helplessness” so common among adolescents with learning disabilities; they came to see themselves as genuine writers and to employ the writing process as a tool for effective written expression.
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