Research supports various aspects of TWR’s approach. For example:
- Explicitly teaching strategies for planning, revising and editing writing has had strong and consistent positive effects on writing skill across grade levels. (Graham et al., 2012; Graham & Perin, 2007)
- Embedding writing instruction in content and having students write about what they are learning in English language arts, social studies, science, and math has boosted reading comprehension and learning across grade levels. (Graham et al., 2020; Graham and Hebert, 2010)
- Providing feedback on the effectiveness of students’ writing and monitoring students’ progress has improved students’ writing. (Graham et al., 2011)
- Summarization and sentence-combining, both TWR strategies, have had strong positive effects on learning and on writing skill. (Graham & Perin, 2007)
- Teaching sentence-construction skills has improved reading fluency and comprehension. (Graham and Hebert, 2010)
- The What Works Clearinghouse, part of the federal government’s Institute of Education Sciences, has recommended that students be taught to construct sentences, specifically mentioning sentence-combining and sentence expansion, another strategy used in TWR’s method. (IES Practice Guide, 2018)
- Cognitive science research that has not focused primarily on writing instruction also provides support for TWR’s approach. More generally, TWR’s approach is supported by well-established research on working memory.
