Few states test students on how well they can write, and the country hasn’t published national writing test results for elementary-age children since 2002. “We found that teachers didn’t know how to teach writing,” said Janet Merrill, literacy coordinator for the school system, located in suburban Denver. Merrill started researching science-backed ways to teach writing and learned that there are effective approaches that aren’t commonly known. Within a year, middle school teachers were asking what was happening at the elementary level. They had never seen students coming to them with such strong writing skills.