Gary Troia

Associate Professor of Special Education Michigan State University

East Lansing MI

Expert in education, specializing in teaching writing to students with and without disabilities, methods for evaluating writing performance

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Biography

Gary Troia's research interests include the connections between oral language and literacy in typical and atypical learners, writing assessment and instruction, and teacher professional development in literacy. His recent work involves examining alignment between states' content standards and assessment frameworks in writing and how alignment between these influences writing outcomes and enables students to meet postsecondary writing expectations. He also is examining predictors of writing quality within a multi-level linguistic framework to help researchers and educators develop better measurement tools for writing.

Industry Expertise

Public Policy

Writing and Editing

Education/Learning

Research

Areas of Expertise

Learning Disabilities

Elementary and Secondary Writing Instruction

Writing Assessment and Measurement

Education

University of Maryland

Ph.D.

Journal Articles

Teaching Children With Language-Learning Disabilities to Plan and Revise Compare–Contrast Texts

Learning Disability Quarterly

Mei Shen, Gary Troia

2017

This study used a multiple-probe, multiple-baseline single-case design to investigate the efficacy of planning, and then revising strategy instruction using self-regulated strategy development on the compare–contrast writing performance of three late elementary students with language-learning disabilities. After receiving the planning instruction, all three students spent more time planning and generated quality written plans. Their essays were longer, included more text structure elements, and demonstrated better overall quality. After receiving the subsequent revising instruction, further increases in writing accuracy were found, but planning time, quality of written plans, text length, and text structure elements somewhat decreased. Also, overall essay quality did not further improve following revising instruction. Positive gains were maintained for 4 weeks and generalized to writing explanatory essays.

Writing Instruction in Middle Schools: Special and General Education Teachers Share Their Views and Voice Their Concerns

Students Who Are Exceptional and Writing Disabilities

Mary E Maddox, Gary A. Troia

We examined writing instruction in the middle school context from the perspectives of special and general education teachers via focus groups and rating scales. We found that special and general educators alike valued a balanced approach to teaching writing, that both groups held a positive view of their teaching efficacy, and that both groups were strongly influenced by their teaching context. The teachers in our study, although supportive of balanced literacy instruction, were unsure of how to enact such an approach to teaching lower level writing skills and higher level composing strategies within a process-oriented framework. Moreover, they identified a number of factors that negatively impact their efforts to deliver effective and comprehensive writing instruction: requirements to teach voluminous subject matter content, large numbers of students, substantial variation in student backgrounds and abilities, diminished student motivation, barriers to successful inclusion of students with disabilities and meeting these students’ writing needs in the general education classroom, and underdeveloped or misaligned district-sanctioned writing curricula.