The Effects of a Motivational Intervention on Improving the Writing Productivity of Students with Learning Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to implement and evaluate a motivational intervention that consisted of explicit timing, immediate feedback through self-scoring, and display of high scores with the goal of encouraging four students with learning disabilities to write longer stories. All participants were initially very unwilling to engage in text production. An ABA reversal design was used to assess the effectiveness of the approach. Immediately after the treatment, the subjects started to write more extensive stories. However, this effect ended abruptly once the intervention was terminated. The study’s results show that, even for very reluctant students with learning disabilities, writing motivation can be significantly enhanced with relatively little effort. All the participants reported enjoying the treatment. The paper ends with a discussion of the experiment’s limitations and the practical implications of the findings.