When Michigan teacher Ljiljana Maric introduced Writing Architect into her fourth grade classroom at Voyageur Academy in Detroit, the online tool did more than assess her students’ writing skills. It gave her research-backed strategies for tailoring her lesson plans to better address her students’ needs.
Those more personalized instruction plans were effective: the class’s proficiency numbers on their Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, or M-STEP, quadrupled during the 2023–24 academic year.
“I still think about the research and how much I learned from it,” Maric says. “It was a truly transformational experience because of how much it helped the kids while making me more confident in my craft.”
Maric, like other educators, knows that strong writing skills are important beyond the classroom. Students will need them to explain their ideas, communicate effectively with coworkers, write reports or even just make themselves understood.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, written communication is fundamental to a vast majority of occupations. Yet, elementary curriculum often focuses on writing as an add-on in lessons.
Michigan State University’s Adrea Truckenmiller wants to change that. An associate professor in MSU’s College of Education, Truckenmiller leads the team that developed Writing Architect, which was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education.
Multiple districts throughout Michigan have used the tool, and many are seeing success. And Truckenmiller hopes that with continued development of the Writing Architect tool, many more will.
Creating a curriculum that works
“The problem teachers have,” Truckenmiller says, “is that writing curriculum has both too much and not enough, forcing teachers to make it up on their own, which can be difficult with 25 kids of varying skill development. We see what the class needs and then provide research-based instructional practices.”
Truckenmiller has been researching written communication in elementary school settings for more than a decade — experience that helped her and her team develop Writing Architect.
The application assesses different components of students’ writing, including text structure, vocabulary use, spelling, sentence accuracy and typing fluency.
The process unfolds like so: Students log in to Writing Architect and listen to an informational passage. Next, they have 15 minutes to write a response to the prompt, followed by a 90-second typing fluency check that helps assess their transcription skills.
Writing Architect and the research team score for the five components listed above. Then, once scored, teachers are linked to instructional material that has been vetted by Truckenmiller and her team and matched to the skills students need to strengthen. That information can help teachers group students with similar needs and provide more targeted instruction.
“If students do not have all the components of an essay,” Truckenmiller says, “we share evidence-based instructional practices that teach, say, how to write an ending or how to write a topic sentence.”
As Truckenmiller and her team work with more districts, she is hearing from teachers who are seeing the impact.
Putting research to work in the classroom
Teachers and school districts have worked with Truckenmiller and Writing Architect since 2021, when the first pilot program began. During the 2023–24 school year, her research team collaborated with about 40 teachers and 800 students. By the 2025–26 academic year, Writing Architect has been used in 50 schools across Michigan.
The app — and Truckenmiller’s research — evolved based on teacher input, observations and student progress.
For Truckenmiller, another key is working with school leaders who can help make stronger writing instruction a schoolwide focus, protecting writing instruction and providing more effective resources to teachers.
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At Merrill Elementary School in a rural area about 20 miles west of Saginaw, principal Rebecca Zimmerman, with the help of Sara Johnston, an instructional coach in the Saginaw Intermediate School District, has helped incorporate Writing Architect and other evidence-based practices across reading, writing and other areas into the school’s curriculum. The systematic focus on evidence-based practices resulted in improvements in M-STEP scores, where the third grade class nearly doubled its proficiency scores in English language arts testing from 2023 to 2024.
Today, led by Johnston, teachers and administrators at Merrill Elementary School are continuing to use lessons from Writing Architect, equipping students with writing skills they can carry with them into middle school and beyond. Johnston says adding this structure and research from Writing Architect across multiple grades of elementary school has set the students up for success. “We are giving students the confidence to get started with writing,” Johnston says.
“Writing is a lifelong skill,” she adds. “The work that Adrea and her team at MSU are doing is life changing.”
Reaching more students
For Truckenmiller, the reason to focus on writing is simple: No matter what careers students eventually enter, they will need to communicate effectively.
With Writing Architect, Truckenmiller wants to set up elementary learners for success in middle school, high school and beyond. While the five years of funding behind her research from the Department of Education are up, Truckenmiller and her team are continuing to find ways to implement Writing Architect in schools across Michigan and beyond.
