Effects of teaching planning strategies to first-grade writers

Arrimada, M., Torrance, M. ORCID: 0000-0002-5305-4315 and Fidalgo, R., 2019. Effects of teaching planning strategies to first-grade writers. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 89 (4), pp. 670-688. ISSN 0007-0998

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Abstract

Background: Traditionally writing instruction at the start of school has focused on developing students’ ability to spell and handwrite. Teaching children explicit self-regulatory strategies for developing content and structure for their text has proved effective for students in later grades of primary (elementary) education.

Aims: The present study aims to determine whether first-grade students benefit from learning higher-level self-regulating strategies for explicit planning of content and structure.

Sample: Five mixed-ability Spanish first-grade classes were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition that received strategy-focused instruction (3 classes, N=62), or to a practice-matched control condition (2 classes, N=39).

Method: Over 10, 50 minutes sessions, the intervention taught strategies for writing stories. Writing performance was assessed prior to intervention, immediately after intervention and 7 weeks post-intervention, in terms of both text features associated with written narratives and by holistic quality ratings.

Results. Students who received the intervention subsequently produced texts with better structure, coherence and quality, and a larger number of features associated with narrative texts. These effects remained at follow-up and were not present in the control condition.

Conclusion. Our findings indicate that teaching explicit strategies for planning text content and structure benefits young writers even when spelling and handwriting skills are not yet well established.

Item Type: Journal article
Publication Title: British Journal of Educational Psychology
Creators: Arrimada, M., Torrance, M. and Fidalgo, R.
Publisher: John Wiley
Date: December 2019
Volume: 89
Number: 4
ISSN: 0007-0998
Identifiers:
NumberType
10.1111/bjep.12251DOI
908497Other
Divisions: Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by: Linda Sullivan
Date Added: 07 Nov 2018 12:36
Last Modified: 30 Oct 2020 09:49
URI: https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/34861

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