Illustrating Story Plans: Does a Mnemonic Strategy including Art Media render more Elaborate Text?

Students who have difficulty with academics often benefit from learning mnemonic strategies which provide a step-by-step process to accomplish a task. Three fourth-grade students who struggled with writing learned the Ask, Reflect, Text (ART) strategy to help them produce more elaborate narrative story text. After initially asking the questions that specify what should be included in a story, participants used art media as they reflected about their answers. This visual story plan served as a reference for later generating their text. All three students improved with story content, but improving story quality proved to be more of a challenge.