A Review of Teaching Sentence-Level Writing Skills to Students With Writing Difficulties and Learning Disabilities

19 studies grouped into three instructional clusters

Students with writing difficulties and learning disabilities; cluster mean ages range from 6 to 12

A systematic review of sentence-level writing instruction, recorded here for one thing it reveals incidentally and better than any purpose-built search could: the AGE ASYMMETRY between the transcription literature and the conventions literature. Because the review sorts its 19 studies into clusters and reports participant counts and mean ages per cluster, it makes the shape of the evidence base visible in a way no narrative claim about "the literature" can.

The grammar-and-usage cluster contains THREE studies with 51 participants in total, mean age 9 to 12. The handwriting cluster contains TEN studies with 394 participants, mean ages 6 to 10. Transcription research reaches comfortably down to six-year-olds; conventions research does not reach below about nine. The three grammar/usage studies are Campbell, Brady and Linehan (1991) - peer- mediated capitalisation instruction, single-case, n = 3, mean age 9, which is the youngest capitalisation training study in existence; Dowis and Schloss (1992) - possessives, single-case, n = 4 at age 12, with three of four pupils moving from 0-10% to 90-100% correct; and Saddler and Graham (2005), the Grade 4 sentence-combining trial the archive already holds. That is the entire controlled base for teaching usage to children, and all three are small.

Not applicable. A review of intervention studies, not of associations. The clusters are drawn from special-education populations, so the ages reported describe who has been studied, not who could be taught.