Improving Young Writers' Planning and Reviewing Skills while Story-Writing

An instructional study examined whether teaching strategies related to planning and reviewing behaviors would affect planning, reviewing, revising, and producing texts. Training texts were examined using a multiple baseline across participants design with multiple probes in baseline. During baseline and in intervention phases, two highly capable 12-year-old sixth-grade students (one boy/one girl) wrote stories on a computer using a word processor. Strategy instruction increased the amount of time writers spent planning, reviewing, and producing text. Results indicated that most stories written after instruction contained more words and all of them contained more sentences and story elements. Frequency (number of words written per minute) during story-writing sessions changed little from baseline to intervention phases for each participant. Findings through social validity evaluations suggest that stories written after instruction were higher in overall writing quality than stories written during baseline. (Contains 18 references; evaluation charts are appended.) (Author/CR)