The Influence of Using a Word Processor on Children's Story Writing

In this work we tested the hypothesis that using a word processor for some months might produce a shift in the text production strategies used by fourth grade elementary school children. Children were expected to focus more on decisions of higher-order level, and to postpone the lower-order level choices to the revision phase. 51 Italian children attending the fourth elementary school grade participated in the study. 28 children formed the experimental group; they used the computer for various activities throughout the school year. 23 children formed the control group — they simply followed the normal curriculum for that school grade. Comparisons of hand-written Pre-test and Post-test narratives by the two groups showed the existence of significant differences between stories written by the experimental group after the training with the word processor, and by the control group. The results support our hypotheses that experimental children write longer texts but make more grammatical errors than control children. There were instead no relevant differences between hand-written and computer-written stories by the experimental group. This result shows that the shift in strategies induced by the use of a word processor is resistent to a change in setting.