Conveniently, my mentor and I had already discussed having the honors class read the book Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder. The book, though written for the average reader, deals with very difficult topics putting Einstein's theories in layman's terms and discussing how these ideas continue to influence the world today. My mentor designed two parts of the project: students first collect information out of the book and then explain it in their own words. The students began by studying the vocabulary used in the book and writing definitions for the scientific words in words their peers can understand. In the second part of the assignment, students picked experiments described in the book to break down using the divisions of the scientific method. Normally, my mentor would have given the students six weeks to complete the assignment for one final grade. However, with my Special Education Project in mind, we decided to grade the rough drafts for the two parts of the assignment as well. In this way, we would be emphasizing the writing process and improvement over the six weeks. Our goal was to see a significant difference between the rough draft and the final product with their project grade reflecting how much they improved.

Before providing a class writing guide for the assignment, I needed to analyze how well the students could organize a paper with no outside help. The students were given no strategies or techniques until after the rough draft of part one was handed in. Subsequently the students spent a class period in a writing workshop and received a packet detailing how to write a formal paper. The writing guide was given to the students in the hope that it would be something that they could refer to not only when writing this paper but also for writing future papers.
 
 

Click here for Writing Strategies Packet

 Among the many strategies to help students with mild disabilities learn are presenting relevance and application, providing modeling, and dividing ideas up into smaller parts (Sabornie, 1997). These techniques were incorporated into the writing guide. A short introduction about why writing for a science class is important was followed by three main sections created using a model developed by Hayes and Flower in 1980 (Byrnes, 2001). The first step in writing is planning. This step, while the most important, is most commonly skipped by students. Often times when students are required to do planning, they merely write down full sentences that will be incorporated into the paper later. I needed not only to show them the relevance and distinctive nature of planning but also to give them specific strategies to achieve their goals. I emphasized there was no one way to organize or plan a paper. I gave them many options, and the students got to choose which met their needs. The second step of the writing process is translating, the act of taking the notes from the planning step and putting them in sentence and paragraph form. Because studies show that students, especially students with mild disabilities, are aided when given some sort of mnemonic device (Sabornie, 1997), I employed the following strategy developed by Harris and Graham in 1987 called TREE (Sabornie, 1997). With some modifications, I have the letters stand for:
T--Topic sentence
R--note Reasons
E--Expand reasons
E--note Ending
My hope was that the students would take the time to think about TREE whenever they begin writing a paragraph. Finally, I gave the students a similar strategy to use in the final step of the writing process: Revising. The mnemonic device used here was COPS developed by Schumaker, Nolan, and Deshler in 1985 (Sabornie, 1997):
C--Have I Capitalized the first word and proper names?
O--How is the Overall appearance of the paper?
P--Have I used Punctuation correctly?
S--Do the words look as if they are Spelled correctly?
The strategies presented in the packet are not only useful to students with specific writing disabilities; they are techniques that can be useful to everyone who wants to improve their writing skills.

From my experience with this particular high school class, I have found that many times handouts are filed away neatly in a notebook never to be looked again or they are thrown away in the recycling bin. In any case, they are useless to the student. Therefore, I designed a workshop and a set of small assignments to encourage the students to look through the packet and practice the suggested techniques. I began the lesson by asking the students to describe their approach to writing the first paper. Not surprisingly, many of them had done it the night before without even reading the book. I followed up with a brief summary of why I thought writing was important, especially to scientists. I brought in experiences from my work in a laboratory where writing was essential. Because these students learn best when given social reinforcement and opportunities for participation, I divided the students randomly into groups of three. I then modeled for them a way of brainstorming ideas for a paper. The group brainstormed questions that they would like to answer in their paper. I monitored the class and gave them praise and feedback on their progress. The students then wrote their suggestions up on the board, and we discussed them together as a class. I modeled several strategies on how these questions could be organized in a way to help in the planning process. We then went over the mnemonic devices to help them in the second and third steps of the writing process. The students were very focused and related that they felt more prepared to write their second rough draft.
 
 
 
 

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