What does research tell us about effective teaching techniques to help adolescents develop their writing skills? This article summarizes Writing Next, a 2007 study of adolescent writing instruction.

An Anticipation Guide is a strategy that is used before reading to activate students' prior knowledge and build curiosity about a new topic. Before reading a selection, students respond to several statements that challenge or support their preconceived ideas about key concepts in the text. Using this strategy stimulates students' interest in a topic and sets a purpose for reading. Anticipation guides can be revisited after reading to evaluate how well students understood the material and to correct any misconceptions.

A concept map help students visualize various connections between words or phrases and a main idea. There are several types of concept maps; some are hierarchical, while others connect information without categorizing ideas.

A concept sort is a strategy used to introduce students to the vocabulary of a new topic or book. Teachers provide students with a list of terms or concepts from reading material. Students place words into different categories based on each word's meaning. Categories can be defined by the teacher or by the students. When used before reading, concept sorts provide an opportunity for a teacher to see what his or her students already know about the given content. When used after reading, teachers can assess their students' understanding of the concepts presented.

The Double-Entry Journal strategy enables students to record their responses to text as they read. Students write down phrases or sentences from their assigned reading and then write their own reaction to that passage. The purpose of this strategy is to give students the opportunity to express their thoughts and become actively involved with the material they read.

The Frayer Model is a strategy that uses a graphic organizer for vocabulary building. This technique requires students to (1) define the target vocabulary words or concepts, and (2) apply this information by generating examples and non-examples. This information is placed on a chart that is divided into four sections to provide a visual representation for students.

The Inquiry Chart (I-Chart) is a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing. Students integrate prior knowledge or thoughts about the topic with additional information found in several sources. The I-Chart procedure is organized into three phases: (1) Planning, (2) Interacting, and (3) Integrating/Evaluating. Each phase consists of activities designed to engage students in evaluating a topic.

It provides students with a way to recognize the relationships between words and concepts using their prior knowledge about a topic. The list-group-label strategy can be used before and after students read.

Paragraph Shrinking is an activity developed as part of the Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS). PALS is a classwide peer tutoring program in which teachers carefully partner a student with a classmate. The Paragraph Shrinking strategy allows each student to take turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of each paragraph. Students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension.

Possible Sentences is a pre-reading vocabulary strategy that activates students' prior knowledge about content area vocabulary and concepts.

Power Notes is a strategy that teaches students an efficient form of organizing information from assigned text. This technique provides students a systematic way to look for relationships within material they are reading. Power Notes help visually display the differences between main ideas and supportive information in outline form. Main ideas or categories are assigned a power 1 rating. Details and examples are assigned power 2s, 3s, or 4s.

Question-Answer relationship (QAR) is a strategy to be used after students have read. QAR teaches students how to decipher what types of questions they are being asked and where to find the answers to them. Four types of questions are examined in the QAR.

RAFT is a writing strategy that helps students understand their role as a writer, the audience they will address, the varied formats for writing, and the topic they'll be writing about. By using this strategy, teachers encourage students to write creatively, to consider a topic from a different perspective, and to gain practice writing for different audiences. Students learn to respond to a writing prompt that requires them to think about various perspectives (Santa & Havens, 1995):

Reading Guides help students navigate reading material, especially difficult textbook chapters or technical reading. Students respond to a teacher-created written guide of prompts as they read an assigned text. Reading Guides help students to comprehend the main points of the reading and understand the organizational structure of a text.

Selective Highlighting/Underlining is used to help students organize what they have read by selecting what is important. This strategy teaches students to highlight/underline ONLY the key words, phrases, vocabulary, and ideas that are central to understanding the reading.

The Semantic Feature Analysis strategy engages students in reading assignments by asking them to relate selected vocabulary to key features of the text. This technique uses a matrix to help students discover how one set of things is related to one another. It improves students' comprehension, vocabulary, and content retention. This strategy helps students to examine related features or concepts and make distinctions among them. By analyzing the completed matrix, students are able to visualize connections, make predictions, and better understand important concepts.

Story Maps are used for teaching students to work with story structure for better comprehension. This technique uses visual representations to help students organize important elements of a story. Students learn to summarize the main ideas, characters, setting, and plot of an assigned reading.

Structured Notetaking is a strategy that helps students become more effective note takers. Using graphic organizers specific to a particular text, structured notes assist students in understanding the content of their reading.

Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for a more concise understanding. Upon reading a passage, summarizing helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them. It is a technique that enables students to focus on keywords and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering. Downloadable graphic organizers are linked to the lesson.

This article describes eight cognitive strategies - including monitoring, tapping prior knowledge, and making predictions - to help readers develop their comprehension skills.