National Center for the

Study of Writing and Literacy

The National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy (NCSWL), one of the educational research centers sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, has completed its mission and no longer functions as an independent entity. The Center was based at the Graduate School of Education of the University of California at Berkeley, with a site at Carnegie Mellon University.

Publications may still be obtained through the National Writing Project (NWP), 5511 Tolman Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Also, you can still send us mail and find information here about NCSWL:

Completed research projects
Workshops
Publications and resources
Researchers

NCSWL Research

The mission of the Center was to improve understanding of how writing is best learned and taught--from the early years through adulthood. The Center supported research projects examining how students learn to write, how teachers can best help students who come from an increasing diversity of cultural backgrounds, how writing can be used more effectively across the curriculum, how larger social forces (such as ethnic background, relations with family members, social class, and the neighborhood) affect success in school, how we might develop better ways to assess what students are learning, and how new technologies and new demands in the workplace affect the literacy skills students need to learn. For a summary of the Center's contributions to writing research over the past ten years, see Technical Report 1-C.

NCSWL Workshops

Through its relationship with the National Writing Project (NWP), a national network of successful teachers of writing, the Center involved classroom teachers in helping to shape its research agenda and in making use of findings from the research. To make these findings accessible to educators, the Center developed three interactive workshops: one for elementary teachers, one for secondary teachers, and one for college teachers. These workshops reflected the Center's belief that research both must move into the classroom and come from it.

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