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6 Research-Based Interventions for Writing

6 Research-Based Interventions for Writing

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A few months ago, Branching Minds did a deep dive into our 5 Most Common MTSS Reading Programs Used in 2020 . Many of these programs have associated writing supports embedded into their platforms, but these primarily target reading intervention.

When creating a comprehensive MTSS support or intervention plan , it’s important to note that literacy interventions need to incorporate both reading and writing. Reading skills help develop a student’s ability to comprehend ideas communicated by another writer, while the act of writing allows a student to develop and communicate his/her own thoughts. While these are two very different skills they each impact the growth of the other, and intervention plans will need to account for both reading and writing support.  

Below, we outline 6 Research-Based Writing Interventions for RTI/MTSS. We include various supports, ranging from free strategies to paid programs to address each school and student’s wide variety of needs. These RTI/MTSS Writing Interventions are available in the Branching Minds Library, the most robust library of evidence-based learning supports and interventions across academics, behavior, and SEL.

Writing Conferences

Writing conferences are a free, research-based writing activity for grades 3-8, and appropriate for all tier levels in MTSS . They’re conducted in a whole-class setting and allow students to share and reflect on their own writing throughout the revision process. Writing conferences also allow for immediate feedback from teachers and peers, clarification on questions, promotion of positive attitudes regarding writing and topics, as well as the incorporation of social benefits such as peer-sharing and collaboration. Research shows that when paired with peer-editing, writing conferences can significantly improve comprehension and application of revision and editing during the writing process.

When planning a writing conference, it’s essential to outline a clear goal for the students to achieve during the process. Teachers model the process before beginning, create a structure to focus on discussion and revision, and demonstrate solutions to problems encountered during the process. Students may be paired up or placed into groups for role-reversal in peer-editing, allowing for additional social support throughout the intervention. 

Graphic Organizers

The use of graphic organizers is a free, research-based writing strategy that can be used for grades K-12 and is appropriate for all tier levels. Although there are a variety of organizers available, the root of this strategy remains the same.

Organizers help students break down complex texts into manageable chunks and construct meaning from what they have read. When incorporated at the beginning of the writing process, organizers help students compile their thoughts before putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard in this modern age).  

Graphic organizers are beneficial for students who struggle with reading comprehension and memory. Research has shown that graphic organizers effectively improve narrative and expository writing skills, particularly in students with learning disabilities. Teachers can model how to fill out a graphic organizer while reading complex texts and scaffold as needed as students complete the organizer independently or in small groups.

The Branching Minds library has a wide selection of free graphic organizers available for teachers, all grade levels, and writing selections.

➡️ Related resource: Audit Intervention Programs in MTSS/RTI

Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonic devices are a free, research-based writing strategy appropriate for K-8, with some adaptability available for higher grade levels. While suitable for all tier levels, mnemonic devices are especially useful for higher-tier students who struggle with memory recall.  

As a writing tool, mnemonic devices can be used to intervene in grammar and spelling for struggling writers. The common phrase “i after e, except after c” is an example of how spelling mnemonics can help students remember complex spelling structures (though, as we all know, these rules are not always true). Expression mnemonic devices are effective for students who struggle in writing homophones or conjunctions, utilizing popular expressions such as FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So) to aid in memory recall while writing.  

Research has demonstrated a link between mnemonic devices and increased student accuracy in word recall, spelling, and grammar conventions. Mnemonic devices can be utilized throughout the writing process, but before applying this strategy, teachers should note particular areas of difficulty in writing, such as spelling, information recall, or grammar rules. 

Step-Up to Writing

Step-Up to Writing is a paid writing program offering a robust curriculum for students K-12. An offshoot of Voyager Sopris Learning, this program is similar to Voyager’s many other learning programs. The program includes professional development, flexible implementation, curriculum compatibility, and subject-area writing support.  

The program establishes a common writing approach across four grade bands: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. The online content supports narrative, informative, and argumentative writing and provides additional support for English language learners . The program’s structure allows for small-group instruction and whole-group instruction, allowing the flexibility of incorporating the program in entire units or in smaller chunks to complement classroom instruction.

Preliminary research has shown Step-Up to be successful in helping students gain mastery in summarization, expository writing, syntax, essay organization, and grammar conventions. This places Step-Up solidly in the “Research-Based” category of ESSA’s levels of evidence.

➡️ Related resource: A Quick Review of MTSS Supports, Interventions, and Accommodations

NoRedInk is a paid writing program appropriate for grades 5-12. One of the newest members of writing interventions, NoRedInk, offers a comprehensive online platform for adaptive writing lessons based on student interests and skills. Reading material is determined by an initial diagnostic assessment that categorizes student interests in different genres to generate texts of high interest to the individual reader. 

This program offers various options for integration into the classroom, including daily writing activities, full curriculum units, targeted grammar exercises, and test prep. Teachers can select activities from the assignment library based on the needs of each student, with support available for English Language Learners.

NoRedInk is fully integrated with Clever, Canvas, and Google Classroom, enabling teachers to seamlessly integrate rosters and gradebooks into the program to allow for easy grading and task assigning. School-based case studies have shown NoRedInk to effectively raise MAP, STAAR, and SAT scores. This places NoRedInk into the “Research-based” category of ESSA’s levels of evidence—an impressive feat for one of the internet’s newer writing programs. 

ThinkCERCA is a paid, research-based close reading and writing platform for grades 3-12, and appropriate for all tier levels in MTSS . Thinkcerca’s units include resources to support routines covering background knowledge and conceptual understanding to improve comprehension, close reading practices such as highlighting and annotating text, and pre-writing routines, including summarizing, planning with graphic organizers, peer editing, and revision. Additional direct instruction and skills lessons allow teachers to target personalized skill development.

Thinkcerca’s implementation resources support literacy routines that allow teachers to work with small groups and individual students. ThinkCERCA meets ESSA’s levels of evidence, showing that students see 2+ years of reading growth and 20% gains in writing when they use it with fidelity. 

mtss-intervention-process-guide

Wrap-Up 

Many factors should be considered when building a writing intervention plan. Students struggle with writing for a variety of reasons. An effective and efficient MTSS support plan should include targeted instruction, high-interest material, and a comprehensive scope on the whole student—not just the intervention area.  

This is particularly true in regards to English Language Learners (ELL). When planning writing interventions for ELL students, it’s important to consider each student’s comfort with language acquisition, and priority should be given to developing reading levels. Research supports more minor writing activities for entering ELL students—daily news reports, dialogue journals, and short, persuasive essays. Many of the strategies and programs outlined above provide additional support for ELL students and could be beneficially added to intervention plans in MTSS . 

 ➡️ On-Demand Webinar: Supporting English Learners Within MTSS

[Guest Author] Mollie Breese

[Guest Author] Mollie Breese

Mollie Breese is the former Content Manager at Branching Minds. She helped streamline the support library, so schools can identify and access the interventions they need to support student success. She researched the newest strategies, activities, and programs to add to the robust library, providing a wealth of resources for partner schools. Prior to joining Branching Minds, Mollie worked in the classroom as an English teacher, Reading teacher, and ESL instructor. Mollie earned her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Missouri, and her M.A. in English Literature from the University of Glasgow.

Connect with [Guest Author] Mollie Breese

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Research Article

The impact of three types of writing intervention on students’ writing quality

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

¶ ‡ These authors are co-first authors on this work.

Affiliation Department of Applied Psychology, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

ORCID logo

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation José Carlos Núñez, Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology

Affiliation Facultad de Educación, Universidad Central de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile

  • Pedro Rosário, 
  • Julia Högemann, 
  • José Carlos Núñez, 
  • Guillermo Vallejo, 
  • Jennifer Cunha, 
  • Celestino Rodríguez, 
  • Sonia Fuentes

PLOS

  • Published: July 18, 2019
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218099
  • Reader Comments

Fig 1

Students’ writing constitutes a topic of major concern due to its importance in school and in daily life. To mitigate students’ writing problems, school-based interventions have been implemented in the past, but there is still a need to examine the effectiveness of different types of writing interventions that use robust design methodologies. Hence, the present study followed a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled design using a multilevel modeling analysis with 370 fourth-grade students (nested in 20 classes). The classes were randomly assigned to four conditions: one comparison group and three writing types of writing interventions (i.e., week-journals, Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD) instruction and SRSD plus Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) program using a story-tool), with five classes participating in each condition. Data supports our hypothesis by showing differences between the treatment groups in students’ writing quality over time. Globally, the improvement of students’ writing quality throughout time is related to the level of specialization of the writing interventions implemented. This is an important finding with strong implications for educational practice. Week-journals and writing activities can be easily implemented in classrooms and provides an opportunity to promote students’ writing quality. Still, students who participated in the instructional programs (i.e., SRSD and SRSD plus story-tool) exhibited higher writing quality than the students who wrote week-journals. Current data did not find statistical significant differences between results from the two instructional writing tools.

Citation: Rosário P, Högemann J, Núñez JC, Vallejo G, Cunha J, Rodríguez C, et al. (2019) The impact of three types of writing intervention on students’ writing quality. PLoS ONE 14(7): e0218099. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218099

Editor: Emmanuel Manalo, Kyoto University, JAPAN

Received: November 12, 2018; Accepted: May 26, 2019; Published: July 18, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 Rosário et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are in the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre, University of Minho. PR, JH and JC were supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, UID/PSI/01662/2013. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

In the last decades, students’ writing problems throughout schooling have been discussed as a topic of educational concern due to the importance of writing in school and life success (e.g., employment) (e.g., [ 1 – 2 ]). To mitigate students’ writing problems, curriculum reforms have been implemented in different educational systems, and researchers have been investigating the efficacy of school-based interventions in improving students’ writing (e.g., free writing activities, strategy instruction as Self-Regulation Strategy Development, SRSD) (e.g., [ 3 – 6 ]). Still, there is a need to disclose evidence on the effectiveness of different types of writing interventions using robust design methodologies. Data is expected to help researchers, school administrators and teachers organize school-based interventions and promote students’ writing skills [ 7 ].

To analyze the effectiveness of three writing interventions (i.e., week-journals, SRSD, and SRSD plus a Self-Regulated Learning program using a story-tool) on fourth graders motivational variables and writing quality a cluster-randomized controlled design was conducted for twelve weeks.

Promoting students’ writing performance

Previous research has strengthened the idea that writing is one of the most powerful and fundamental tools, not only to learn, but to communicate and share knowledge [ 8 – 9 ]. In fact, the ability to communicate and express one’s thoughts and ideas through writing is truly essential for success at school and in further education [ 10 ]. This section provides an overview of three types of writing interventions examined in the current study.

Writing week-journals.

Students’ motivation and engagement in writing are likely to grow in learning environments providing many opportunities and encouragements for students to express themselves through writing [ 11 – 14 ]. Journal writing is a practice that can be easily implemented in classrooms without much effort, time, or resources (e.g., [ 5 , 15 ]). Journals are a type of free writing that is informal and personal [ 16 – 17 ] and have gained popularity among the activities aiming at promoting writing [ 17 ] and students’ confidence in writing [ 18 ]. The nature of this educational tool allows students to write freely without strict directions, restrictions or assessment purposes [ 16 ]. While writing journals, students will choose their writing topic [ 19 ], engage deeply in their writing activities [ 17 ] and improve their writing skills and creativity [ 16 ]. Furthermore, writing journals allow students to enhance their reflection skills, critical thinking, self-expression, self-regulated skills, and knowledge [ 17 ].

Notwithstanding the potential positive influence of writing journals on students’ motivation and writing performance (e.g., [ 16 , 18 ]), findings from the extant research are not consistent. Prior research (e.g., [ 4 , 16 , 20 – 21 ]) found no statistical evidence on the effectiveness of free writing on students’ writing quality. But, a recent study with fourth graders concluded that students who wrote weekly journals for twelve weeks showed a higher improvement on the quality of their compositions, than that achieved by students in the comparison group [ 15 ]. Despite these encouraging findings, students in the experimental group reached a plateau after the first three weeks of writing journals, which might indicate that this type of intervention may not be sufficient to foster progress on writing quality.

Writing and self-regulation.

Considerable progress has been made in the last thirty-five years to understand the role of self-regulation in writing. Not surprisingly, research found that skilled writers master self-regulated learning competencies (e.g., self-set goals, self-reinforcement) [ 22 ], and also that many students struggle with writing [ 23 ]. This may happen because effective writing requires: (i) high levels of self-regulation and attentional control to manage the writing environment; (ii) knowledge of the writing topic, genre, processes and skills involved in writing [ 22 ]; (iii) strategies for planning, text production [ 24 – 25 ] and monitor the writing activity [ 26 ] to meet specific self-set goals [ 27 ].

Three decades ago, Karen Harris and Steve Graham built the Self-Regulation Strategy Development model (i.e., SRSD model; [ 28 ])—an instructional program designed to enhance writing and self-regulation strategies. SRSD was designed to attain the three major goals, as follows [ 29 ]: (i) to help students develop the knowledge and skills needed to manage the writing strategies involved in the writing processes (i.e., planning, writing, revising and editing); (ii) to support students using the strategies and self-regulatory skills (e.g., goal-setting, self-instruction, self-assessment, self-reinforcement) while monitoring and managing their own writing (e.g., [ 30 – 32 ]); and finally (iii) to help students develop positive attitudes and beliefs about themselves as writers [ 31 , 33 – 34 ]. In fact, when students perceive themselves as self-efficacious in writing, they are likely to exhibit good writing quality and invest effort while carrying out a writing task [ 34 – 36 ].

The meta-analysis by Graham et al. [ 5 ] analyzed the impact of the SRSD model on students’ writing and found that adding self-regulation instruction (e.g., goal setting and self-assessment) to strategy instruction can improve the overall writing quality of typical developing writers and, in most cases, of struggling writers. The benefits of participating in SRSD programs are well established in literature (e.g., [ 23 ]), but further research is needed to explore complementary forms infused in regular curriculum that may increase the teaching of writing strategies [ 3 , 5 , 15 ]. Recently Rosário and colleagues (e.g., [ 15 , 37 – 41 ]) discussed the use of story-tools in class as a successful strategy to foster students’ motivation, and promote self-regulated learning (SRL). Based on the extant evidence which supports the role of stories to promote SRL, current authors believe that infusing story-tools in the regular curriculum combined with writing instruction (i.e., SRSD) may be beneficial for increasing the levels of writing quality.

Story-tools to promote SRL.

Stories, traditional tales and fables are well-known ways of delivering knowledge [ 40 ], to promote children’s development [ 42 – 45 ], imagination [ 46 ], and self-reflection about their own behaviors [ 40 ]. Bearing this in mind, researchers in Iberian Peninsula, created SRL story-tools programs that focus on promoting SRL through different types of narratives. The Yellow trials and tribulations [ 45 ] is a story–tool developed to promote SRL at elementary school, and was used in the present study. This narrative tells the story of the disappearance of the color Yellow from the Rainbow and describes the adventures experienced by Yellows’ friends, the other colors of the rainbow, whilst searching for Yellow. Along this quest in search for Yellow, who should not be left alone, the other colors of the rainbow met new friends and learned various useful SRL strategies to overcome the obstacles found along the way.

This story-tool was designed to promote students’ SRL strategies (e.g., goal-setting, self-reflection, strategic planning, and organizational strategies), to increase motivation and academic achievement [ 47 ]. This tool is grounded on the social cognitive framework [ 48 ], and assumes that contextual variables and learning settings play important roles in students’ motivation and self-regulation [ 47 ]. The stories in each chapter of the story-tool address the PLEE cyclical model: Planning, Execution and Evaluation (see [ 40 ] for a more detailed explanation), which is rooted in the SRL model by Zimmerman [ 49 – 50 ]. Students are expected to regulate their school behaviors in three cyclical phases: forethought (i.e., processes prior to learning), performance control (i.e., processes while learning), and self-reflection (i.e., processes after learning). The former model presents a recursive structure, through two paths of logic. The process is derived from Planning through Execution to Evaluation, but the same cyclical nature is also reset in each phase, thus reinforcing the self-regulation logic of the process. These two structuring loops, throughout and within the phases, reinforce the SRL synergy strengthening the process [ 38 , 40 , 51 ].

Modeling and teaching the learning strategies (e.g., goal-setting, strategic planning, organizational strategies), embedded in the story-tool underlies on three types of knowledge [ 38 ]: (i) the declarative knowledge—learning the meaning of a learning strategy (e.g. know what taking notes is); (ii) the procedural knowledge, that is related to learn how to implement these learning strategies (e.g., know how to take notes in class); and, finally, (iii) the conditional knowledge that demands students to know when it is more appropriate to use a specific learning strategy in a particular learning context (e.g., when it is more useful to take notes) [ 52 ]. For example, in chapter 6 of the story-tool [ 45 ], the Ant General, one of the characters, explained the planning phase to his troops (i.e., declarative knowledge): “in order to plan, we have to decide what we need to know and what we need to do for everything to run smoothly. Afterwards, to avoid any problems, we allocate time for each task” (p. 27).

Each chapter provides students with the opportunity to acquire, practice and reflect on the use of the SRL strategies embedded in each phase of the PLEE model. This tool allows the analysis of the characters’ behavior which are similar to those of children in real life situations (e.g., the Bird-Teacher told the little birds a story about a lazy deer who did not listened to the teacher advice’s friends and hurt himself while competing with a grasshopper ), hence helping students to reflect on what they may learn with the characters’ behaviors. This experiential closeness fosters children’s engagement in learning [ 40 ]. For example, it is expected for students to transfer the content learned throughout the story to the process of writing compositions.

Present study

Driven by the worldwide need to promote students’ writing quality and to examine the impact of various types of writing interventions tailored to students’ needs and school resources, the current study examines the impact of three types of writing interventions (i.e., week-journals, SRSD, and SRSD plus a SRL program using a story-tool) on students’ writing quality.

Research data on the positive effects of using week-journals to improve students writing quality is inconsistent; however recent data from a controlled study [ 15 ] reported that students using week-journals improved the quality of writing after the first three weeks, and then reached g a plateau on the following weeks. These findings suggest that this tool solely may not be sufficient to sustain students’ progress on the writing quality. Moreover, the corpus of research on SRSD is vast and data has consistently indicated the efficacy of the SRSD programs to improve the quality of writing [ 5 , 23 ]. Finally, Rosário and colleagues have been advocating for the last decade the merits of using story-tools to promote SRL [ 40 , 53 ]. The current research aims to examine the potential positive effects of adding a story-tool to SRSD program. This design addresses the call by authors [ 3 , 5 ] to explore ways of promoting the teaching of writing strategies embedded in regular curriculum. Children read and learn stories in class and at home; in fact, stories make up part of their lives and play a vital role in their growth and development. While reading books and reflecting on the messages conveyed, children are expected to learn how to think, and also to learn about everyday tasks [ 42 , 43 ]. For these reasons, we believe that adding a story tool to the training of writing strategies is likely to improve children writing quality. Findings are expected to add literature on writing quality and improve educators’ practices on writing.

In addition, the impact of several potentially moderating variables, such as self-regulation in writing, self-efficacy in writing, attitude towards writing, prior achievement in writing, gender, age and interactions between these variables and will be examined. Based on extant literature (e.g., [ 15 , 30 , 39 ]) we hypothesize that: (i) students’ writing quality of the three intervention groups will be higher when compared to students in the comparison group; (ii) students’ writing quality in the SRSD and SRSD plus the SRL story-tool conditions will be higher when compared to students in the week-journal condition; (iii) all covariates will be significantly related with students’ writing quality. No hypothesis will be made regarding the conditions SRSD and SRSD and the SRL story-tool because literature lacks data in this regard. This step of the research is exploratory.

Design and participants

The present study was conducted with fourth grade students, the final grade level in Portuguese elementary school. The Portuguese Ministry of Education approved the study by giving their written consent (n. 036000004). This study was reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of the Universidade do Minho. The study followed a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled design for twelve weeks, in 18 public schools in the north of Portugal. The participating teachers and their fourth-grade students were randomly assigned to the four conditions, with five classes participating in each condition (i.e., Groups A, B, C and D; see Fig 1 ). This methodology is useful to access the comparative effectiveness of experimental conditions that vary in their practices. Moreover, this tool helps avoid “contamination” between those participants receiving the intervention and those who are not, preventing that the treatment effect would be compromised [ 54 ]. During the twelve weeks of the study, students on the comparison condition (Group A) did not participate in any type of program focused on writing instruction. Teachers were instructed to follow the regular Portuguese writing curriculum to meet fourth grade level teaching requirements. According to the Directorate-General for Education and the Minister of Education and Science [ 55 ] this included teaching students about grammar, vocabulary, spelling, sentence construction, punctuation, handwriting, organization and revision of different types of text (i.e., narrative, informative, descriptive, letters, invitations, and texts using direct speech). In group B students wrote a journal on a weekly basis for 12 weeks. Students in group C and D were given writing instructions following the SRSD model; in group D the story-tool “ Yellow Trials and Tribulations ” [ 45 ] were added to the treatment received by the group C (see Fig 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218099.g001

Participating students and their teachers.

The participants were 370 (183 girls) fourth graders nested in 20 classes from 18 public elementary schools in the north of Portugal. All the participants had Portuguese as their home language, aged between 9 and 10 ( M = 9.45, SD = .51). The fourth-grade classes were randomly assigned to four groups: A ( N = 92); B ( N = 90); C ( N = 98 ); and D ( N = 90 ). Students with special education needs (i.e., specific learning disorder and learning disabilities) were excluded from the data analyses.

All the 20 teachers, 17 were female, aged between 34–56 years ( M = 42.4, SD = 6.59) had an undergraduate degree and experience in teaching ranging between 12 and 34 years ( M = 21.5, SD = 6.16). Class sizes ranged between 10 and 23 ( M = 20.38, SD = 4.75). None of the teachers enrolled in the study reported having received specific writing instruction in their professional development.

After receiving the consent from the Portuguese Ministry of Education, an email explaining the overall study objectives was sent to 26 public schools located in northern part of Portugal. Eighteen schools (a response rate of 69.2%) and 20 teachers agreed to participate in our research. In these schools, the families were lower-middle classes, as noted by the high percentage of students (40%) receiving free or reduced-price lunches. These demographics were collected from the offices of the participating schools. A letter informing about the study was sent out to ask permission for the children participate the study. Participants’ confidentiality was assured (e.g., eliminating the names and researchers’ personal notes that could link the participants to their teachers or schools). All students returned the signed parental consent forms. Finally, the 20 teachers (classes) who agreed to participate were randomly assigned to the four treatment conditions (i.e., comparison group and three experimental groups). Teachers were blind to the purpose of the study and all agreed to follow the fourth grade Portuguese curriculum (e.g., variety of text genres, grammar and punctuation) throughout the study.

Two weeks prior to the beginning of the study, a training course with two modules was delivered separately to all participating teachers within the same condition (i.e., Groups A, B, C and D). The first module (9 h) presented and discussed of the general framework (e.g., genre of the compositions, protocol of the weekly administration of the questionnaires by the research team) and the assessment measures (e.g., rating scale for teachers to assess the quality of the compositions). Participants were informed that following the protocol was a requirement to participate, and all agreed.

In the second module (8h) teachers worked collaboratively with researchers and assistant researchers in 2-hour sessions over a span of four days (i.e., 20 pre-service teachers) on the assessment of the overall quality of the children compositions. The training on how to use the rating scale (see measures) followed a hands-on approach. Teachers selected a set of compositions made by their students in the third grade, and switched those compositions with their colleagues and assistant researchers on a random basis. Each composition was assessed independently using the rating scale. After scoring each composition, teachers and research assistants met and discussed scores to reach a consensus. To ensure reliability of the assessment process, each teacher assessed eight compositions over the four days, each time with a different research assistant. Kappa value was calculated using the Coder Comparison Queries in the Navigation View of the NVivo software. In the end of the training the Kappa value of the 20 dyads ranged between .80 and .86 ( M = .82) which can be labeled as “almost perfect” according to Landis and Koch [ 56 ].

Five weeks post-intervention, all teachers from the four groups participated in a three-hour evaluation meeting to analyze their experiences during the intervention (e.g., comments and suggestions that could help in future research), and discuss preliminary data (see, [ 57 – 58 ]) from the standardized exam in Portuguese language. In this meeting, teachers from the four groups declared, as agreed, to have followed the national writing curriculum (e.g., teaching grammar, punctuation and the other types of genres) to meet fourth grade level expectations. Teachers who fully participated in the research were offered a 27-hour (1 ECTS) training course about the learning and instruction processes.

Treatment integrity

To assure the integrity of the implementation of the protocol conducted by the teachers, four different measures were used: i) all teachers were delivered dossiers with session record sheets (see, [ 59 ]) including the elements and activities for each session. These dossiers helped teachers monitor the steps for each session. Each of the activities intended for the session and group were detailed in topics and teachers were asked to check it off when the activity was completed (e.g., teachers are expected to maintain a silent class while students are writing compositions; compositions are expected to be written in 45 minutes; journals are due to be kept in the classroom in a closet under the responsibility of a research assistant; students write about the composition topic assigned to that week topic; teachers do not make comments on students week-journal entry; teachers do not suggest topics for the week-journals); ii) Moreover, teachers were asked to write a short diary explaining how they followed protocol, and if not, to explain why; iii) Additionally, on a random basis, a research assistant observed 30% of the sessions using the same session record sheets. These research assistants also wrote a short diary describing teachers’ adherence to the protocol; iv) Finally, during the duration of the intervention, on a weekly basis, the principle investigator met with the researchers and research assistants and engaged in each condition separately. These meetings addressed project issues and adherence to protocol of each condition (e.g., analysis of record sheets data). Afterwards, research assistants enrolled in assessing compositions met with their dyad teacher and discussed the same issues. The major goal of these meetings was to prevent the teachers and the researcher (enrolled in delivering training lessons of conditions C and D) from withdrawing from the planned protocol by adding new components based on their experience of what was working.

Treatment fidelity was high for the writing composition sessions. Teachers reported adherence to the protocol was 95% ( SD = 2.77, range 90–100). Data from the observations of both intervention sessions indicated that teachers completed 93% of the activities ( SD = 3.24, range 85–98). Data from the teachers’ diaries and research assistants allowed to conclude that discrepancies in the assessment may be due to different interpretation of teachers’ behaviors in class (e.g., classroom management issues such as maintain complete silence in class while students were doing their compositions, and responding to students with “leading questions”).

But Concerning the treatment fidelity of the week-journal sessions, data indicated a good treatment receipt. Research assistants who enrolled in this treatment condition reported to have completed 87% of the tasks ( SD = 2.62, range 81–90) across all sessions. Data from the observations of this intervention sessions indicated that research assistants completed 84% of the tasks ( SD = 3.06, range 80–90).

Lessons for the groups C ( SRSD instruction) and D ( SRSD instruction plus the story-tool) were delivered by one of the authors of this paper with training in SRL and writing strategies. This researcher followed the treatment fidelity procedure previously described.

Treatment fidelity for lessons of conditions C and D was high for both. Researcher reported 88% ( SD = 1.61, range 85–90) and 85% ( SD = 3.62, range 79–90) of the activities completed across all lessons, respectively. Data from the observations of both conditions indicated that researcher completed 84% of the activities ( SD = 1.94, range 81–87) and 82% ( SD = 2.55, range 78–85), respectively.

Specific intervention procedures for all participating students

For twelve weeks, on each Monday morning during regular Portuguese language class, all students’ from the four conditions wrote a composition in 45 minutes. The composition topic was sent by email to all teachers each Sunday evening (e.g., Imagine that you were on a boat school trip . Suddenly , the boat was caught in a big storm and shipwrecked . Write a story about your adventure as a castaway and your life in a desert island) . Along the duration of the investigation, students wrote one story each week. Compositions were assessed individually and every Thursday after school, along 12 weeks, the dyads (i.e., teacher and a randomly assigned research assistant) met to find consensus on the scores given. Finally, the graded compositions were delivered to students each Friday. Additionally, every Friday afternoon for approximately 25 minutes, all students from the four conditions were asked to fill in questionnaires to assess SRL strategies in writing, attitude towards writing and self-efficacy. The research assistants administrated these instruments in class.

Comparison group (group A) and Week-Journals (group B).

During the twelve weeks of the study, students on the comparison condition and weekly-journals did not participate in any type of writing instruction, besides the writing of the weekly compositions proposed for this research. Teachers were instructed just to follow the regular writing curriculum [ 55 ] to meet fourth grade level expectations.

Additionally, for twelve weeks, students in the week-journals condition (i.e., group B) wrote a journal in 25 minutes each Friday morning under the supervision of a research assistant. While students were writing their journals they did not receive any instructions, nor feedback afterwards. Prior to the beginning of the study, participants’ confidentiality was assured, by telling students that the journals would only be used for research purposes (i.e., teachers did not read the journals). Each student received a notebook “journal” to write their weekly entries (i.e., approximately ten lines) about their week’s events at school or at home. Journals were kept in the classroom in a closed box and were the responsibility of a research assistant.

General instructional procedures (intervention conditions C and D).

SRSD writing instruction, as well as the topics for condition D, were delivered along eleven sessions on a weekly basis, by one of the authors, during regular Portuguese language lessons. The length of the sessions for students in group C and D was 45 minutes. Both intervention conditions are briefly described in S1 Appendix . An extended description of the lessons and materials suggested for instruction is provided elsewhere [ 53 ].

SRSD instruction (intervention condition–group C).

The writing instruction followed the six stages of the SRSD model [ 25 , 28 ] as follows: (i) development of background knowledge; (ii) discussion and description of the strategies to be learned; (iii) modeling the use of those strategies; (iv) memorization of those strategies; (v) supporting of the strategies; and, finally, (vi) independent performance. In the present study, instruction started at the first stage and continued into the following stages (see S1 Appendix ). Despite acknowledging the sequence of the content, we followed Harris and Graham [ 28 ] and asked students to memorize the mnemonics taught (strategy from stage four) since session 1. Thus, this stage was recalled at the beginning of every session to analyze if students had memorized the mnemonics [ 60 ]. A number of self-regulation procedures were also taught to students, including self-monitoring while planning their stories, self-reinforcement and self-assessment [ 60 ]. The materials for teaching writing narratives using the SRSD model were translated to Portuguese and used by fourth graders and teachers in class.

Writing strategies.

In the first sessions, students learned a general strategy to apply while writing their compositions. This strategy included three steps, represented by the mnemonic POW: Pick my ideas (i . e ., decide what to write about) , Organize my notes (i . e ., organize writing ideas into a writing plan) , Write and say more (i.e., continue to modify, upgrading the plan while writing). For example, on the second step of POW (i.e., organize my notes) students were taught a genre-specific strategy for writing notes for each part of the story: the mnemonic S-A-C [principal steps of a story: Setting ( S ), action ( A ) and conclusion ( C )] (see [ 53 ]). To help students become familiar with the S-A-C mnemonic, students were taught to ask themselves the following six questions, aligned with the three S-A-C steps: Where does the story take place ? When does the story take place ? Who are the main characters (describe them) ? What do the main characters do or want to do (sort them in the right way) ? How does the story end ? How do the main characters and the others feel ? For writing notes, students were presented with a graphic organizer (see [ 53 ]).

Strategy instruction.

The strategy instruction followed the SRSD model [ 28 ], however the time spent on each stage was adjusted to the design of the current study. As shown in S1 Appendix , lesson one and two aimed to develop students’ prior knowledge on composition and to discuss and explore the characteristics of a good story. General writing strategies (i.e., POW) were presented and discussed with students. Students’ negative beliefs about writing performance were also discussed, and students were encouraged to transform negative thoughts into positive beliefs (e.g., "I can do it, if I use the right strategy”). In lesson three and four , students revisited the general writing strategies (i.e., POW) and discussed the SRL strategies (i.e., self-instructions, goal setting, self-assessment and self-reinforcement) they will use during and after writing a story. In lesson five , six and seven the planning, writing and assessing of compositions using general (i.e., POW) and SRL strategies (i.e., self-instructions, goal setting, self-assessment and self-reinforcement) were modeled collaboratively in class. Modeling the use of strategies helped students to learn to apply these strategies and to develop competencies, attitudes and beliefs, while writing independently. Lesson eight , nine and ten focused on strengthening students’ abilities for independent planning, writing and assessing of stories by using general (i.e., POW) and SRL strategies (i.e., self-instructions, goal setting, self-assessment and self-reinforcement). The work on these lessons aimed to wean students off the graphic organizer [ 60 ]. Finally, in lesson eleven students wrote, without support, a composition, using the strategies learned. Still, as suggested by authors [ 61 ], if any story elements were not included, the previous stages were recalled.

SRSD instruction plus the story-tool (intervention condition–group D).

In the current study, the Yellow Trials and Tribulations story-tool [ 45 ] was used to help students learn a set of learning strategies and apply them into the story-tool learning context while reflecting upon their own writing activities (i.e., on how and when to implement the general and SRL strategies). Sessions for the group D were preceded by the reading out loud of one or two chapters of the book in class. During the reading, small breaks were made and students were invited to discuss and analyze what was happening in the story plot (see [ 40 , 53 ]). During the session students did the same writing tasks as students in group C. The Appendix aligns the stages from SRSD (i.e., group C) with the chapters of the story-tool.

Instruments and measures

Self-regulated learning strategies inventory (sr_w)..

The SRL Strategies Inventory [ 38 ] assesses nine SRL strategies concerning the three phases of the SRL process (i.e., planning, execution and evaluation). In the preset study, this scale was adapted with the aim of assessing the SRL strategies used while writing: Planning (i.e., ‘‘I make a plan before I begin writing. I think about what I want to say and how I need to write it”), Execution (i.e., “While I write my composition I follow my plan”, and Evaluation (i.e., ‘‘I compare the grades I received with the goals I set for that subject.”). The 9-items were scored on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always). Cronbach’s alpha in this study was .80. Data from the confirmatory factorial analysis run support the construct validity of this measure. The model fits well data [χ 2 (25) = 53.639; p < .01; AGFI = .907; TLI = .900; CFI = .927; SRMR = .058; RMSEA = .076 (.048-.104)]. The factor weights of the nine items ranged from .507 to .703 (all statistically significant at p < .001). After fit the model, none of the modification indexes was greater than 5.00.

Attitude towards writing (AT_W).

Each of the nine items from the writing attitude survey [ 34 ] asked students to indicate how they felt when they engaged in writing activities at school or at home (e.g., How do you feel when you think you have to write instead of being able to play ? ) . Students were asked to mark one of the four images of Garfield the Cat on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = very unhappy; 4 = very happy). This scale was, in the present study, translated and adapted to the Portuguese population. Cronbach’s alpha in this study was .86. The construct validity analysis yielded data supporting a unifactorial model [χ 2 (25) = 34.086; p > .05; AGFI = .933; TLI = .976; CFI = .983; SRMR = .034; RMSEA = .043 (.000-.076]. The factorial weights of the nine items ranged from .660 to .750 (all statistically significant at p < .001). After fit the model, none of the modification indices was greater than 6.00. All data suggest construct validity.

Self-efficacy in writing (SE_W)

Students’ self-efficacy for planning and writing a story was assessed with five-items [ 60 ]. An example of an item was “When writing a paper , I have trouble finding the right words for what I want to say” . The five-items were scored on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 4 = strongly agree). This scale was translated and adapted to the Portuguese population. Cronbach’s alpha in this study was .71. Data from the confirmatory factorial analysis run support the construct validity of this measure. [χ 2 (3) = 5.646; p > .05; AGFI = .943; TLI = .945; CFI = .983; SRMR = .026; RMSEA = .067 (.000-.151)]. The factorial weights of the five items are statistically significant at p < .001). After fit the model, the modification indices do not suggest any changes in the model.

Writing performance

Individual notebooks were delivered for each participating student for research purposes. The notebooks had twelve parts (i.e., one for each of the twelve independent writing moments) and each had three subparts: (i) a lined page for the writing of the composition; (ii) a rating scale for students to review and self-assess the quality of their compositions; and finally, (iii) a checklist for the individual feedback given by the teacher.

Compositions.

In order to assess the writing quality of students’ compositions, a holistic rating scale was used based on the criteria defined in the Educational Progress Test (i.e., a standardized exam) in Portuguese language for fourth graders [ 62 ]. The rating scale assesses topics such as (i) title; (ii) organization (introduction, main body paragraph, ending), (iii) grammatical correctness of sentences (e.g., active verbs, use of direct speech, descriptive adjectives, punctuation, morphology) (iv) coherence; (v) originality; (vi) sentence structure, (vii) word choice; (viii) spelling errors. Prior to scoring, all narratives were typed into a word document and the number of words were counted. Students’ personal information was removed and punctuation, spelling and capitalization were corrected to minimize bias that might influence the scoring process as suggested by the literature (e.g., [ 34 ]). Teachers were encouraged to read the composition to obtain a general impression of overall writing quality. Compositions were then scored on fourteen 5-point Likert scales (1 = low quality; 5 = high quality), ranging from 0 to 65 points. All compositions from the same class were scored independently by a dyad (teacher-research assistant) using the mentioned rating scale. Each dyad met every week to find a consensus about the grades for each composition as previously stated (see procedures subsection). Cohen’s Kappa coefficient showed an inter-rater agreement that ranged among the 20 dyads between .82 and .90 ( M = .86, SD = .023) which can be labeled as “almost perfect” according to authors [ 63 ]. The compositions rated for each topic were assessed and the final score were delivered before students write the following composition.

Feedback on the week-journals was not provided to students. In the end of the study four new research assistants who were unfamiliar with the design of the study, assessed all journals quality using the same holistic rating scale. Two research assistants assessed each journal independently, following procedures similar to those used to assess the compositions. The Kappa value obtained was .84, considered as very good according to Landis and Koch [ 56 ].

Prior achievement.

Prior achievement in Portuguese language was obtained from students’ writing quality scores on three compositions written between April and June from the previous school year (third grade). Two independent research assistants scored the compositions by following the same procedures as described above. Compositions were scored on fourteen 5-point Likert scales (1 = low quality, 5 = highly quality), ranging from 0 to 65 points ( M = 50.46, SD = 8.63). Cohen’s Kappa coefficient showed an inter-rater agreement of .87, which can be labeled as “almost perfect” according to authors [ 63 ].

Data analyses

Considering the hierarchical nature of data, a three-level hierarchical model was conducted. To avoid the enumeration of all the possible models, a data-driven strategy for selecting the best model by computing information criteria was used.

Fig 2 presents a “spaghetti plot” of the compositions scores (CS) by time. This plot indicates that students who received any form of treatment have increased the CS scores, although clearly there is considerable individual heterogeneity (i.e., some participants show accelerating positive trends, while others have decelerating negative trends). Some participants even have significant swings upward or downward across time of their CS response. In contrast, the trend lines appear to be approximately linear for most participants. With regard to the population level, Fig 1 shows interesting differences for the four groups across time. The group B (i.e., Week-journal) began with a moderate upturn in CS followed by a very slow increase, whereas the groups C and D (i.e., SRSD and SRSD+SRL) showed a moderate but steady and gradually accelerating upward trend up at the end of the study. The participants in the comparison group did not show an upward trend.

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research based writing interventions

Data from a preliminary analysis suggested considerable random variation, intercept and slope at both levels 2 and 3. The results also indicated the need to retain the main effects of time-varying predictors (i.e., SE_W , SR_W and AT_W ) and the interaction between SR_W and linear TIME in the level-1 model but treat them as fixed instead of allowing them to change randomly across level-2 and at level-3 units. To correctly interpret the model parameters, it is important to note that all time-varying predictors were included in the model centered at its mean.

research based writing interventions

Next, we explored whether students nested within classes receiving training for CS during 12 weeks began at a different level, or progressed over time at a different rate of growth and acceleration, than those who did not receive training. Thus, the level-3 model incorporated the treatment conditions, the explanatory variable of major interest in the current research. As previously mentioned, the 20 classes were randomized in groups of five for each of the treatment conditions: control, week-journal ( WJ ), self-regulated strategy development ( SRSD ), or SRSD+SRL condition. In the analysis, these four groups were compared using Helmert contrasts. Specifically, the contrast coefficients for the three group-related Helmert contrasts were: H 1 = c (-1, 1/3, 1/3, 1/3), H 2 = c (0, -1, 1/2, 1/2), and H 3 = c (0, 0, -1, 1). The first Helmert contrast involves a comparison of subjects randomized to control versus some form of treatment. The second Helmert contrast implies to compare subjects randomized to WJ versus some form of SRL , while the goal of the third Helmert contrast is to compare the subjects randomized to SRSD versus SRSD + SRL .

research based writing interventions

Consistent with common practice in multilevel modeling, we assume that the random effects associated with classes are independent of the random effects associated with students nested within classes, and that all random effects are independent of the level 1 random components. It is also assumed that the residuals are normally distributed with zero means and uncorrelated with respective right-hand covariates. Multilevel analysis was conducted by fitting a variance components structure with parameters estimated by the full maximum likelihood (ML) estimation as implemented in PROC MIXED of [ 64 ].

Descriptive analyses

Prior to conducting the analysis, the distribution of the data of the different samples for the outcome variable (composition skills– CS_W ) and time-dependent covariates (i.e., SE_W , SR_W and AT_W ) were examined. The extent of variations of skewness and kurtosis for the variables were included in the model, as well as the means and standard-deviations presented in Table 1 . As shown in this table, the skewness values are generally within the range (i.e., ± 1) of what is considered a reasonable approximation to the normal curve. Looking at the kurtosis, it is necessary to note that depending on the time of the measurements, the variables are very slightly platykurtic (i.e., its peak is just a bit shallower than the peak of a normal distribution) or very slightly leptokurtic (i.e., its central peak is just a bit higher than the peak of a normal distribution). As a result, it can be concluded that the values for skewness and kurtosis remain within allowable limits for all the time periods.

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Multilevel analyses

Selecting the best model..

To address the goals of the present study (i.e. compare the performance of subjects receiving training in writing skills with the performance of subjects with no training, verify whether all treatments have the same effectiveness, and determine which of two treatments (C or D) was more effective); first the best linear mixed model to the CS use data was selected. Tables 2 and 3 present the results of fitting eight growth curve models to the CS data using full ML in SAS PROC MIXED. Table 2 summarize the results for five multilevel models applied to CS data as follows: the unconditional two-level growth model (A) examined the standard linear change, the unconditional two-level growth model (B) and three-level growth model (C) examined the quadratic change, the conditional three-level growth model (D) examined the effects of the time-varying predictors and their interactions through time, and the conditional three-level growth model (E) examined the process of adding time-invariant predictors to models. Table 3 presents the models that incorporate the effects of treatment conditions, both with and without the heterogeneous variance specifications at level 1.

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To facilitate the selection of the best model, results (not shown in the table due to space) corresponding to the unconditional means model (i.e., a no-change trajectory model) were described. The estimated outcome grand mean across all occasions and students was 54.29 ( p < .001), which suggests that between the first and the twelfth week, the average CS is non-zero. Examining the variance components, we found statistically significant variability both within-students (31.55, p < .001) and between-students (39.37, p < .001). Findings allowed to conclude that CS outcome varies from week to week, and also that students differ from each other.

To determine whether the unconditional means model was preferable to Model A, the compound null hypothesis was tested on a set of differences between models (e.g., regarding the linear growth rate, its associated variance components and covariance between slope and intercept—this last term is not shown in the table due to space). The difference in deviance statistics, (31830.5–30516.5) = 1314, far exceeds 16.27, the 0.001 critical value of a χ 2 distribution on 3 degrees freedom ( df ), allowing to reject the null hypothesis ( H 0 ) at the p < .001 level stating that all the three parameters are simultaneously 0. Hence, the unconditional two-level growth model provides a better fit than the unconditional means model. It is possible to conclude that Model A is the best fit model? Comparison of Models B and A suggest a positive response. Comparing deviance statistics for pair of nested models yields a difference of 189.8. As this exceeds the .001 critical value of a χ 2 distribution on 4 df (18.46), the H 0 is rejected, and we may conclude that there is potentially predictable variation in the acceleration rate across students. For Model B, despite the variance for quadratic component of change ( r 2 i ) being statistically significant ( p < .001), its associated fixed effect ( TIME 2 ) is not. The tests associated with the random acceleration parameter indicate that there is substantial variation in the quadratic rates across students. The test for the fixed effect indicates that the average value of these rates is indistinguishable from 0. Thus, the trend across time is essentially linear at the population level but curvilinear at the individual level.

Then the unconditional quadratic three-level Model C was compared to the unconditional quadratic two-level Model B. Since students are nested within classes, and may vary considerably among themselves, a three-level model of level-1 occasions nested within level-2 students nested within level-3 classes was also used to analyze this clustered longitudinal design. As there are only 20 classes, CS dataset is not ideal for building a three-level growth model, but it can still be useful for descriptive purposes. As indicated in Table 2 , the deviance statistics and number of estimated parameters for the unconditional Model C were 30011.4 and 16, respectively. The likelihood ratio test comparing the Model C to Model B yields a deviance difference statistically significant at any alpha level we might reasonably select (30326.7–30011.4 = 315.3, with 6 df , p < .001). Findings indicate that the more complex model provides the better fit. Each information criterion is consistent with that judgment.

Because we are interested in finding a level-1 individual growth model that describes the fundamental structure of these data, additional time-varying predictors and interactions among level-1 predictors and TIME (i.e., SE_W , SR_W , AT_W , SE_W × TIME , SR_W × TIME , and AT_W × TIME ), but also the required additional variance and covariance components (see Model D) were included. Although not shown in the Table 2 , the covariance components were not constrained to be 0. When comparing the Model D with the Model C, there is significant evidence that the model incorporating the main effects of time-dependent covariates and interactions fits better (i.e. the difference in deviances was (30011.4–29960.6) = 50.8; df = 6, p < 0.001). Having identified an appropriate level-1 model, the additional effects of time-invariant predictors were included in the level-2 model (i.e., AGE , GEN and P_ACHIEV ). For Model E (i.e., model that incorporates time-varying predictors, time-invariant predictors, and the level-1 interactions), the deviance statistic was 29441.1 with 25 df , and 29960.6 with 22 df for Model D (i.e. model that only incorporates time-varying predictors and the level-1 interactions). As a result, the likelihood ratio test statistic was 518.5 with 3 df ( p < .001), which provides strong evidence for Model E. Although the Model E provides a more realistic representation of the pattern of change in CS scores than Model D, the Model E contain terms that are not necessarily required. In this paper an even more parsimonious model will be assessed (i.e. Model F). Model F is a simplification of Model E in which the main effect of AGE and non-significant level-1 interaction terms are removed. Comparing the last two models each other, we find a trivial difference in deviance of 0.7 on 3 df , showing that the elimination of AGE , SE_W by TIME and AT_W by TIME has hardly changed the goodness of fit.

After running the appropriate model selection at level-2 for the CS use data, we examined the performance of subjects receiving training in writing skills with the performance of subjects who did not receive such training, and the performance of participants receiving treatment in different modalities. Model G in Table 3 presents the results of fitting this model to data. The final conditional model (Model G) included three class-level variables (i.e., the aforementioned set of Helmert contrasts for group), two student-level variables ( GEN and P_ACHIEV ) and five within level-1 repeated observations ( TIME , TIME 2 , SE_W , SR_W and AT_W ). The cross-product between SR_W and TIME and cross-level interaction term H 1 by linear TIME (i.e., difference between the control and treatment groups across time) were also included in the Model G. Data in Table 3 and indicated that adding the three group-related Helmert contrasts (i.e., H 1 , H 2 and H 3 ) cross-level interaction between H 1 and TIME to the model which decreased the deviance from 29441.8 to 29407.5, a decrease of 34.3. This change in deviance is tested at 4 df using the χ 2 statistic and was found to be significant.

It might appear, that Model G is preferable. But before proceeding to examine Model G in depth, we considered the possibility that the residual variances at level 1 may depend on treatment groups (see, [ 56 ]). Returning to Fig 1 , we note that participants display considerable heterogeneity across the groups. Thus, we might hypothesize that residual variance at level 1 in these data is different for the four conditions. Table 3 presents estimates for homogeneous variances (Model G) and for heterogeneous variances that occurs at level-1 (Model H). The likelihood ratio test comparing Model G to Model H, shows that the deviance declined 132.1 (29407.5–29275.4), which far exceeds the .05 critical value of a χ 2 distribution on 3 df . We therefore may reject the null hypothesis stating that all four variances are equal and conclude that the heterogeneous model fits this data better than the simple homogeneous level-1 specification. For this reason, Model H was adopted as our “final model” (see Table 3 ). The AIC (BIC) weight of this model (> 0.97) implies that there is a high probability that this is the best model among all of the examined models.

Analysis of the selected multilevel model.

research based writing interventions

Finally, following the procedure of Vallejo and colleagues [ 65 ] in examining statistical power to detect a significant group-by-time-interaction (i.e., H1 × TIME), a power below the often-mentioned benchmark of 0.80 was obtained; specifically, the post hoc power was found to be approximately 0.44.

Before describing the structure of the random-effects model matrix, we included two intraclass correlations (ICCs) for this three-level hierarchical model (see Table 3 , bottom panel). The first is the level-3 ICC at the class level, the correlation among quality of compositions from different second level students nested on the same class. The second is the level-2 ICC at the student-within-class level, the correlation among quality of compositions measured at different time points in the same student and class. We found that the quality of compositions is strongly correlated within the same student and class, but only slightly correlated within the same class, while this ICC is non-negligible. Table 3 (bottom right panel) also displays the design effect (DEFT) indices at levels 2 and 3 in Table 3 . DEFT is used to determine how much larger the standard errors estimates will be (considering clustering compared to the analysis that ignore clustering). For example, for the ICC in level two (class) (see Table 3 ) the unconditional DEFT is expected to be 1.73; meaning that standard errors would only capture a little more than one-half of the true sampling variability if the third-level was ignored.

research based writing interventions

In this study, the impact of three types of writing interventions (i.e., week-journals, SRSD, SRSD plus story-tool) on the quality of writing compositions was analyzed using a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled design. Moreover, to analyze the effects of the four intervention conditions on writing composition skills, a set of covariates were controlled (i.e. self-regulation in writing, self-efficacy in writing, attitude towards writing, prior achievement in writing, gender and age). These variables have been selected due to previous findings on their positive effects on students’ writing quality.

The current research contributes to literature due to three major aspects. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that examined the benefits of a free writing activity (i.e., week-journals) in comparison with two other instructional writing programs. Moreover, this study contributes to literature by adding a story-tool that enhances self-regulation to the SRSD model. Lastly, this study analyzes the effects of three types of writing intervention by conducting a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled design using a multilevel modeling analysis. This complex design of the randomized cluster groups over time allowed for the effectiveness of this educational intervention to be measured in a real-life setting, but with robust control. Current findings are expected to provide relevant data that may help researchers and educators improve their work to increase the students’ quality of writing.

The effectiveness of writing interventions on writing quality

Findings support our hypothesis by showing differences between the treatment groups in students’ writing quality over time, but with some reserves. Firstly, it was found that the students enrolled in the three intervention groups exhibited higher levels of writing quality in their composition when compared to those of students with no intervention (i.e., comparison group). These findings indicate that all writing intervention groups showed a positive and significant impact on students writing quality, which increased the intervention time. These findings are consistent with literature that reports the benefits of writing journals [ 15 ], of participating in instructional writing programs as SRSD (e.g., [ 3 , 5 , 30 , 60 – 61 , 66 ]), and of participating in general SRL training programs using story-tools [ 37 – 41 ]. Moreover, it was observed that the evolution of the writing quality of the three intervention groups was, overall, essentially linear and positive, indicating a constant acquisition of writing skills occurring over time.

Secondly, it was found that students who participated in the instructional programs (i.e., SRSD and SRSD plus story-tool) exhibited higher writing quality than students who wrote week-journals. Furthermore, Fig 2 also shows that the writing quality of students in the week-journals condition achieved a plateau after three weeks, while the writing quality of students in the two instructional programs continue to improve after that period. These findings are consistent with those of colleagues [ 15 ] showing that in order to master higher levels of writing skills and overcome the plateau effect it would be necessary to enroll in instructional writing programs designed to promote writing quality. These results are also consistent with data from the meta-analysis by Graham et al. [ 5 ], which found that studies involving strategy instruction using the SRSD model produced a statistically positive effect on students’ writing quality with an effect size (ES) of 1.17 in average. On the other hand, investigations enrolling students in free writing activities (e.g., writing about a free topic) produced an average weighted ES of 0.30 [ 5 ].

Finally, one important goal of this research was to learn the impact of adding the usage of story-tools to SRSD intervention on the writing quality. Students’ participating in SRSD plus story-tool instruction showed a higher writing quality than their peers in the SRSD condition; however, the differences found were not statistically significant. This finding may be due to the fact that the SRSD model includes self-regulation strategies focused on writing of compositions (e.g., goal setting, self-assessment) (e.g., [ 28 , 60 , 67 ]), and that the usage of the story-toll in classes was not focused on writing, but on the promotion of general SRL strategies. In the post-intervention evaluation meeting, teachers in the condition SRSD plus story-tool instruction enthusiastically shared their students’ scores in the composition section in the national standardized exam in Portuguese language, which counts as 30% of their overall grade. As this issue was brought to discussion, the teachers in the other conditions were invited to share the results of their students (i.e. for the comparison group, scores ranged between 5 and 30 points ( M = 18.68, SD = 5.46); for the Week-journals group, scores ranged between 10 and 30 points ( M = 19.24, SD = 3.88; for the SRSD group, scores ranged between 11 and 29 points ( M = 20.35, SD = 4.99); and for the SRSD plus story-tool group between 12 and 30 points ( M = 23.82, SD = 4.02). The percentage of students scoring lower than 15 points (negative scores) per condition was: 17%, 10%, 10% and 2%, respectively). Globally, participant teachers in conditions B, C and D were very happy with their students’ writing performance that far exceeded the National average score for compositions, and their expectations.

The effects of the covariates in writing quality

For what concerns the covariates assessed in this study, our findings have supported the need and usefulness of accounting for every single covariate (i.e., self-regulation in writing, the self-efficacy in writing, the attitude towards writing, the prior achievements in writing, the gender and the age), as they have shown a positive impact on the writing quality at the end of the instructional program. Accordantly, as previous studies focused on writing have indicated, when students receive training in SRL strategies they are likely to produce texts with quality (e.g., [ 3 , 68 – 69 ]), to engage deeply in school tasks and show higher academic achievement [ 51 ]. Furthermore, when students’ show a positive attitude towards writing [ 34 ] and perceive themselves as self-efficacious in writing, they are likely to show signs of good writing quality and invest effort while carrying out a writing task [ 34 – 36 ]. Specifically, it was found that the prior achievement in writing composition seems to be the variable with more influence on writing composition skills. Nevertheless, a positive relationship between each moderate variable and the writing composition performance was observed, except between self-regulation in writing and time, which were found to have a negative impact, indicating that the levels of self-regulation tend to be less predictive of the writing composition skills throughout time. This may be explained by the fact that all groups tend to match, with time, their self-regulation skills as consequence of their engagement in this study. Finally, it was observed that the improvements achieved by girls were greater than those of boys. This supports previous research that has shown that girls present higher scores in writing quality than boys (e.g., [ 8 , 59 , 70 ]).

Conclusions, limitations and implications

Globally, the improvement of students’ writing quality over time is related to the level of specialization of the writing intervention implemented. This is an important finding with strong implications for educational practice. For example, the week-journals writing activity can be easily implemented in classrooms by teachers without much effort, time, and resources (e.g., [ 15 ]), providing teachers with an opportunity to help their students improve their writing quality. Thus, school administrators, teachers, and parents may consider the usage of week-journals as a regular writing activity for all children as a preventive approach to writing difficulties. Data of the current study did not show statistical significant differences between results from SRSD and SRSD plus story tool condition, it would be useful to conduct further research on instructional writing interventions using story-tools. In the current study, stories didn’t help students significantly improve their writing quality when compared with their counterparts in condition C.

Furthermore, in the post-research evaluation meeting teachers in the condition C and D expressed with enthusiasm that their students improved not only in their writing but also in other content domains. As the majority of the participating teachers in condition D stated in the post-research evaluation meeting, “students started to use PLEE for everything since planning their games in the playground or the steps to solve a difficult math problem , to evaluate the cake baked at home or at school” (T 11 ). Participants in the condition C and D added that they felt that their students started to enjoy learning and their motivation increased for learning to write, specially the struggling students. We believe that this is a relevant finding that stresses the importance of the training on writing strategies rather than the mode of delivery. Both interventions trained students in the use of writing strategies in context, and the interventions used examples to explore the strategies, and yielded similar results. The use of the stories may contribute to improvement of students general SRL [ 40 ], but as results indicate do not help improve students writing quality directly.

Despite the promising contributions referred, further research is needed to disclose the benefits of the usage of the story-tool in combination with writing instruction. In fact, implications derived should be taken cautiously due to the limitations of this study. The present study used self-reports to assess SRL strategies, attitude towards writing and self-efficacy in writing. However, self-reports did not capture real-time response demands of authentic learning environments [ 51 ]. For example, it is possible that these instruments did not capture the benefits and potential of the story-tool to improve writing quality. These possible explanations reinforce the need to include event measures in the research design likely to capture the processual nature of the variables being studied.

Moreover, future research could consider including variables that may help explain results (e.g., writing goals, anxiety towards writing, contextual variables [ 65 ]), and improve the sensitivity of the measures, (e.g., using on task measures to access SRL). Finally, given the insight provided by the data collected in the post-research meeting, future studies may explore in depth the complex process of learning writing strategies in combination with a story-tool, using qualitative methods to analyze students’ and teachers’ experiences during the program.

Furthermore, our findings indicated that students’ writing quality in the two instructional conditions increased throughout the end of the study. It would be relevant to conduct studies with a longer duration, and with more classes in each condition to learn about the efficacy of these programs and to promote the writing quality throughout time. Finally, consistent with extant literature, we believe that educators are expected to use the best evidence available to make informed decisions and design their classes instruction accordingly [ 71 ]. We hope current findings on the efficiency of different writing interventions may help educators contextualize this knowledge and develop the best writing program possible.

Supporting information

S1 appendix..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218099.s001

S1 Questionnaire.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218099.s002

S1 Data Base.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218099.s003

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5 Research-Based Writing Interventions for Your MTSS

Nick Woolf

Despite its importance as a cornerstone of academic success, writing instruction often gets the short end of the stick in the classroom. An essential form of communication across all fields, writing is often relegated to the English Language Arts classroom—where it is second fiddle to reading instruction. Educators prioritize teaching reading due, in part, to its role in standardized testing, and effective writing instruction can fall to the wayside .

Busy teachers don’t have the time to find and vet effective writing resources . That’s why we put together this list of five research-based writing strategies to give students explicit instruction and practice in writing.

Access 21 reading and writing interventions in our free toolkit

5 Writing Interventions to Add to Your MTSS Intervention Library

Below you’ll find implementation instructions for writing activities to support students’ writing skills at every grade level, from elementary school through high school.

  • Paragraph Burger
  • Four-Square
  • Mentor Texts
  • Sentence Starters
  • Paraphrasing

1. Paragraph Burger

The Paragraph Burger is a strategy to teach writing to students at all levels, across genres. This visual graphic organizer supports students in the planning process of writing.

  • Author: Panorama Education
  • MTSS Tier: Tier 1

Developmental Stages: Lower Elementary, Upper Elementary, Middle School

Goal: Assist students with organizing paragraph structure for a given writing task

Action: 

Preparation:

  • Create or print paragraph burger worksheets for individual student use. 

Prepare a completed and annotated burger template to display in the classroom for modeling and student reference.

Instructions:

Explain to students that well-written paragraphs follow a particular structure. Tell them that they will be using the Paragraph Burger graphic organizer to plan their writing. 

Distribute the burger template and review the parts of a paragraph as students follow along on the template:

The top bun represents the introduction or topic sentence of the paragraph. This sentence should “preview” the rest of the paragraph for the reader.

The fillings (middle) of the burger represent supporting details. These should “prove” what was stated in the first sentence.

The bottom bun represents the concluding sentence of the paragraph. This sentence should restate the introduction in a new, connected way.

Work as a class to create a simple model paragraph based on general knowledge (for example, how to tie your shoe or brush your teeth). Highlight the topic sentence, supporting details, and conclusion as each is created.

Instruct students to try the strategy on their own. Then, ask volunteers to share their finished Paragraph Burgers with the class, or have students share within a small group. 

Why this works

The Paragraph Burger strategy is an effective planning tool to support student writing and highlight the components of a structured and well-written paragraph. 

In addition, it provides a visual model that can help developing writers across levels of writing proficiency organize and relate information concretely.

2. Four-Square

The four-square method is a strategy used to help students at all writing levels plan and organize their writing within a simple graphic organizer.

  • Developmental Stages: Lower Elementary, Upper Elementary, Middle School, High School
  • Goal: Provide students with visual and scaffolded pre-writing, or planning, support
  • Identify a writing prompt to use with this strategy.
  • Provide blank sheets of paper to students if they will be making their own four-square organizer. Alternatively, print and distribute a premade four-square template to students. 
  • Prepare an example four-square organizer to share with students as a model.
  • Inform students of the writing prompt. Engage in a class discussion regarding the topic to activate prior knowledge. 
  • Introduce the Four-Square graphic organizer, showing students the model you prepared. Explain that they will use a Four-Square organizer to plan and organize their writing.
  • If students will be making their own graphic organizers, instruct them to fold a sheet of paper in half twice, once horizontally and once vertically. Then have them unfold the paper and draw a box in the center that overlaps all four squares.
  • Tell students to think about how they will answer the writing prompt in one paragraph. Then have them write the topic sentence of the paragraph in the center box. 
  • Instruct students to write supporting details in the outer squares. 
  • Discuss how students might use the completed four-square organizer to complete the writing assignment as a class. If time allows, have students take these steps.

The four-square graphic organizer is a visual and kinesthetic approach to pre-writing. Students can perform various planning tasks, from identifying details to conceptualizing their final product. The organizer can be used as a scaffold, with the writing task broken down into more digestible pieces. 

3. Mentor Texts 

By observing, rereading, and closely analyzing published writing, students see examples and learn the strategies of good writing that they can integrate into their own compositions.

  • Author: Digital Promise
  • Developmental Stages: Middle School, High School
  • Goal: Through discussions and rereads of mentor texts, students develop their own voice and confidence by seeing how the authors create their own voice.
  • Identify a text that exhibits the aspects of writing you want students to adopt in their own writing, such as text structure, vocabulary, or syntax.
  • Prepare copies of the text for each student to annotate in class.
  • Read the text out loud or have the students read to themselves in class.
  • Introduce students to the specific writing concepts they’ll be identifying in the text.
  • Have students work in pairs or small groups to discuss and annotate the text. For example, if you are using the text to teach students to develop a topic, they can discuss and annotate the text for significant and relevant facts, concrete details, and relevant quotes.
  • Tip: Offer students multiple opportunities to encounter the text to deepen their understanding. 

Example: Use This Strategy In Your Classroom

Watch how these 11th grade teachers use a mentor text to develop students' abilities to select the most significant details in a text. As students reread their text to find evidence and quotations, they identify concrete techniques that they can try in their own writing, developing their disciplinary literacy skills.

Learning science research provides insights into how best to support and engage our full diversity of learners. The Learner Variability Project (LVP) team at Digital Promise works at the intersection of researchers, educators, and edtech developers to design and develop a more rich and equitable education for each learner.

4. Sentence Starters

Sentence starters are a tool designed to support students in creating complete, assignment-appropriate (spoken and written) sentences. The strategy can be used to scaffold student learning and offer specific support to English language learners and emerging writers.

  • MTSS Tier: Tier 1, Tier 2
  • Developmental Stages: Lower Elementary, Upper Elementary
  • Goal: Give students a scaffold for relaying main ideas and concepts using complete sentences
  • Decide on the prompt or topic students will be required to write about. Then, create related Sentence Starters and provide them to each student. 
  • Sentence Starters can be scaffolded to guide students in how they sequence and form the ideas within their writing. For example, the first starter may target summarizing (e.g., This idea is supported by details such as __, __, and __). The second starter can target higher depth of knowledge, such as inferring (e.g., The author is implying ___ by ___). 
  • Inform students that sentence starters are a way for writers to guide their thinking and help them get their ideas on paper.
  • Display or distribute the sample writing prompt. Review it with students. Then share two or three sample Sentence Starters. Finally, briefly model how one might complete the Sentence Starters using prior knowledge or new information. 
  • Display or distribute the Sentence Starters students will use. 
  • Direct students to refer to the Sentence Starters throughout their drafts to accurately share their ideas in writing. 
  • Optional: Have students read completed Sentence Starters aloud with a partner. 

Beginning writers often have difficulty verbalizing or writing down their thoughts and ideas. Using sentence starters provides the needed support to translate their ideas on paper accurately. 

Additionally, when students complete and read the starters aloud, they share and hear various sentence structures and vocabulary and engage in academic conversations. Starters support students in being specific with their ideas, provide a starting point for writing, and decrease anxiety about the writing process. 

5. Paraphrasing

Successful paraphrasing involves identifying key ideas and supporting details in a text and rephrasing them using simpler language. A paraphrase is often the same length as or longer than the original text.

The ability to paraphrase a text demonstrates that a student has read critically and proficiently.

  • Developmental Stages: Upper Elementary, Middle School, High School
  • Goal: Students can accurately recount key ideas and details in a text after reading it, using original language and phrasing. This strategy aims to help students recall the text and strengthen their analytical reading skills. In a classroom, it helps teachers monitor students’ comprehension of texts.
  • Identify a text that you can use to model paraphrasing.
  • Consider a text that can be used in multiple settings, such as within a small group or for independent student work.
  • Explain to students that paraphrasing means stating a text’s main ideas and details in your own words. Share that paraphrasing is an important strategy to check your comprehension of a text during and after reading.
  • Model the strategy: Project a short text and read it aloud to the class. Think aloud about your process for identifying both key ideas and details, allowing students to track your thought process. Use digital markup strategies for additional scaffolded support (circle main ideas, underline details, etc.).
  • Next, model how to transform this initial paraphrase into a short paragraph. Pause to define plagiarism (to use another person’s ideas or words as your own without properly crediting them) and explain the importance of avoiding it, especially through unattributed direct quotations. 
  • Share tips for making it easier to put text in your own words, including rereading, looking up unfamiliar words and identifying synonyms, taking notes as bullet points instead of complete sentences, combining and dividing sentences, and changing the order of ideas while maintaining a logical sequence.
  • Guided practice: Guide students in performing the strategy in small groups. Project or provide a copy of another short text. Have a volunteer in each group read aloud the text. Then direct students to reread the text and work together to identify key ideas and details, using markup strategies as needed. Each group should then write a short paragraph, paraphrasing the text. 
  • Call on groups to share their paragraphs with the rest of the class. Encourage students to identify any problems they encountered while trying to put the text in their own words and troubleshoot as a class, using the tips you introduced earlier. 
  • Independent practice: Have students perform the same activity independently with a new text. Before students write their paraphrase, have them use any notes they have to explain the text to someone else. If the partner has trouble understanding the paraphrase, encourage the student to reread further and annotate the text.

Educational research indicates that when students successfully understand and apply the strategy of paraphrasing, a significant increase in reading comprehension occurs. In addition, the ability to recount key ideas and details in a reader’s own words can offer the complementary advantages of increased comprehension and reading confidence. 

Supporting the Whole Student

Learning recovery is top of mind for district administrators and MTSS leaders everywhere. Now more than ever, students need holistic support and research-based practices that improve their learning.

Ensuring educators in your district have access to high-quality strategies for teaching writing will enable students to reach their full academic potential.

Download the MTSS Interventions Toolkit

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Handwriting is back in the curriculum after a long absence. Educators now understand teaching handwriting explicitly is firmly linked to reading and spelling achievement. Although it never disappeared totally, it was de-emphasized in most districts. But it’s now clear handwriting plays a critical role in literacy and is making a comeback.

Research and teaching writing

  • Published: 12 July 2021
  • Volume 34 , pages 1613–1621, ( 2021 )

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  • Steve Graham 1 , 2 &
  • Rui A. Alves 3  

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Writing is an essential but complex skill that students must master if they are to take full advantage of educational, occupational, and civic responsibilities. Schools, and the teachers who work in them, are tasked with teaching students how to write. Knowledge about how to teach writing can be obtained from many different sources, including one’s experience teaching or being taught to write, observing others teach writing, and advise offered by writing experts. It is difficult to determine if much of the lore teachers acquire through these methods are effective, generalizable, or reliable unless they are scientifically tested. This special issue of Reading & Writing includes 11 writing intervention studies conducted primarily with students in the elementary grades. It provides important new information on evidence-based writing practices.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

There are many different ways that teachers can learn about how to teach writing. One way of acquiring such knowledge is by teaching this skill to others. As teachers apply different instructional procedures, they form judgments about the value and efficacy of these practices. In essence, they learn by doing (Graham, 2018 ).

A second way teachers learn about how to teach writing is by observing others and learning from them (Graham, 2018 ). Teachers likely remember some of the instructional methods used by those who taught them to write (e.g., teachers, mentors, parents, guardians, and peers). They may in turn adopt some of these practices when they teach their own students. This may be particularly true for instructional practices they considered effective.

Teachers can gain additional insight into teaching writing by observing and absorbing insights offered by others who have taught writing or studied how to teach it. This includes knowledge acquired from instructors teaching literacy and writing courses as well as experts offering advice on writing instruction at conferences, through workshops, podcasts, or other forms of information sharing. Teachers may also learn about teaching writing by discussing this topic with their peers or observing them as they teach writing.

A third source of knowledge that teachers can access are published materials about how to teach writing. This includes textbooks and articles on the subject, curriculum guides, commercial materials, and position statements from professional organizations to provide just a few examples. These resources can further involve digital sources such as videos demonstrating how to apply specific writing procedures, experts promoting specific teaching techniques, or web sites devoted to writing instruction.

The concern

Given all of the possible knowledge sources teachers can access or experience, there is an abundance of information, recommendations, and teaching materials on how to teach writing that is available to teachers. This blessing experiences at least one serious limitation. Too often, there is limited, circumscribed, or no evidence that the proffered advice, know-how, or wisdom works. There are many claims about what is effective, but too little proof. Unfortunately, this observation applies to much of the lore that teachers acquire about writing instruction.

Teaching lore mainly involves writing practices teachers experienced when they learned to write, instructional practices teachers develop and apply with their students, writing practices they see other teachers apply, and teaching practices promoted by experts (Graham & Harris, 2014 ). While we have no doubt that teachers and experts possess considerable knowledge and insight about how to teach writing, basing the teaching of this complex skill on such lore alone is risky.

Why is this the case? One reason is that it is difficult to determine which aspects of teaching lore are valid. For example, there are many things a teacher does while teaching writing. When their students’ writing improves, they may attribute this change to specific procedures they applied. While this evaluation may be correct, it is also possible that this judgment is incorrect or only applies to some students or to a procedure in a given context.

Teachers are not the only ones who can succumb to such selective bias. Specific teaching lore promoted by writing experts are also susceptible to misinterpretation in terms of their effectiveness. To illustrate, writing experts can overestimate the impact of favored instructional methods, forming judgments consistent with their philosophical views on writing development or instruction. For instance, proponents of the whole language approach to learning to read and write believed that writing and reading develop naturally just like oral language (Goodman, 1992 ). Consistent with these beliefs, they championed an approach to literacy instruction based on the use of informal teaching methods (e.g., reading and writing for real purposes), while at the same time deemphasizing explicitly and systematically teaching students foundational writing and reading skills and strategies (Graham & Harris, 1997 ). Instead, these skills are only taught when the need arises, mostly through short mini-lessons. Advocates for whole language frequently promoted the effectiveness of this two-pronged approach (Begeron, 1990 ), without providing much in the way of empirical evidence that it was effective, or perhaps even more importantly, that it was as effective as other alternatives such as reading and writing programs that emphasized reading and writing for real purposes, coupled with systematic and explicit skills and strategy instruction (Graham & Harris, 1994 ). Even for fundamental writing skills such as spelling, there is considerable evidence that both informal teaching and explicit instruction are effective (Graham, 2000 ; Graham & Santangelo, 2014 ), while whole language approaches are fundamentally misguided about what is written language (Liberman, 1999 ).

Whole language is not the only approach to teaching writing that has suffered from questionable claims about its effectiveness. Even the venerable Donald Graves was guilty of this to some degree with the process approach to writing that he supported and advocated (see Smagorinski, 1987 ). The evidence he offered in support of his favored approach to teaching writing relied in large part on testimonials and exemplar writing of selected students, presenting a potentially overly optimistic assessment of this approach. This is not to say that the process approach is ineffective, as there is now considerable empirical evidence supporting the opposite conclusion (Sandmel & Graham, 2011 ). Instead, this example illustrates that adopting whole cloth even highly popular and widely used teaching lore without careful consideration of its effectiveness and the evidence available to support it can be risky. The lack of evidence or the type of evidence provided can make it extremely difficult for teachers or other interested parties to determine if the testimonials or evidence used to support specific teaching lore in writing are representative or atypical.

A third issue that makes some teaching lore risky is that it may be based on the experience of a single or a very small number of teachers. As an example, this can occur for knowledge a teacher acquires as a result of his or her experience teaching writing. The teaching practice(s) may in fact be effective for the students in this teacher’s classroom, but they may not be effective when applied by another teacher or with different students. Until this proposition is tested, there is no way to determine if this teaching lore will produce reliable results when applied more broadly.

As these concerns demonstrate, the validity, generalizability, and replicability of instructional practices based on teaching lore are uncertain. This is not to devalue what teachers or experts know, but to demonstrate the limits of this knowledge.

Evidence-based writing practices

The concerns about the value of teaching lore raised above raises the question: How should the structure and details of writing instruction be determined? The solution that we recommend is to take an evidence-based practice approach to both enhance teachers’ knowledge and develop writing instruction. Starting with medicine in the 1990s, and spreading quickly to psychology, informational science, business, education, and a host of other disciplines, this movement promoted the idea that practitioners in a field should apply the best scientific evidence available to make informed and judicious decisions for their clients (Sackett et al., 1996 ). The basic assumption underlying this approach is that the findings from research can positively impact practice. The evidence-based practice movement was a reaction to practitioners basing what they did almost strictly on tradition and lore, without scientific evidence to validate it.

One reason why this represents a positive step forward in education and the teaching of writing is that instructional practices based on high quality intervention research addresses the three issues of concern we raised about teaching lore. First, high quality intervention studies address the issue of validity. They are designed specifically to isolate the effects of a specific instructional practice or set of instructional practices. They provide systematically gathered evidence on whether the instructional practices tested produced the desired impact. They further apply methodological procedures to rule out alternative explanations for observed effects. Second, high quality intervention studies address issues of generalizability by describing the participants and the context in which the practice was applied, and by using statistical procedures to determine the confidence that can be placed in specific findings. Three, they address the issue of replicability, as the replication of effects across multiple situations is the hall mark of scientific testing (Graham & Harris, 2014 ).

Another reason why the evidence-based approach represents a positive step forward in terms of teaching writing is that the evidence gathered from high quality intervention studies can provide a general set of guidelines for designing an effective writing program. Graham et al. ( 2016 ) created such a roadmap by drawing on three sources of scientific evidence: true-and quasi- experimental writing intervention studies, single-case design studies, and qualitative studies of how exceptional literacy teachers taught writing (see also Graham & Harris, 2018 ). They indicated that the scientific evidence from these three sources supports the development of writing programs that include the following. Students write frequently. They are supported by teachers and peers as they write. Essential writing skills, strategies, and knowledge are taught. Students use word processors and other twenty-first century tools to write. Writing occurs in a positive and motivating environment. Writing is used to support learning. Based on several recent meta-analyses of high quality intervention studies (Graham, et al., 2018a , b ; Graham, et al., 2018a , b ), Graham now recommends that the evidence also supports connecting writing and reading instruction (Graham, 2019 , 2020 ).

A third reason why the evidence-based approach is a positive development is that it provides teachers with a variety of techniques for teaching writing that have been shown to be effective in other teachers’ classes and in multiple situations. While this does not guarantee that a specific evidence-based practices is effective in all situations, a highly unlikely proposition for any writing practice, it does provide teachers with instructional procedures with a proven track record. This includes, but is not limited to (Graham & Harris, 2018 ; Graham et al., 2016 ):

Setting goals for writing.

Teaching general as well as genre-specific strategies for planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process. Engaging students in prewriting practices for gathering, organizing, and evaluation possible writing contents and plans.

Teaching sentence construction skills with sentence-combining procedures.

Providing students with feedback about their writing and their progress learning new writing skills.

Teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing.

Increasing how much students write; analyzing and emulating model texts.

Teaching vocabulary for writing.

Creating routines for students to help each other as they write.

Putting into place procedures for enhancing motivation.

Teaching paragraph writing skills.

Employing technology such as word processing that makes it easier to write.

It is also important to realize that an evidence-based approach to writing does not mean that teachers should abandon the hard-earned knowledge they have acquired through their experiences as teachers or learners. The evidence-based movement emphasizes that teachers contextualize knowledge about teaching writing acquired through research with their own knowledge about their students, the context in which they work, and what they know about writing and teaching it (Graham et al., 2016 ). When applying instructional practices acquired through research as well as teaching lore, we recommend that teachers weigh the benefits, limitations, and possible harm that might ensue as a consequence of applying any teaching procedure. Once a decision is made to apply a specific practice, it is advisable to monitor its effectiveness and make adjustments as needed.

Finally, while the scientific testing of writing practices has provided considerable insight into how writing can be taught effectively, it is not broad, deep, or rich enough to tell us all we need to know about teaching writing. It is highly unlikely that this will ever be the case. We operate on the principle that there is no single best method for teaching writing to all students, nor is it likely that science will provide us with formulas to prescribe exactly how writing should be taught to each student individually. Writing, learning, children, and the contexts in which they operate are just too complex to make this a likely consequence of the evidence-based movement. As a result, we believe that the best writing instruction will be provided by teachers who apply evidence-based practices in conjunction with the best knowledge they have acquired as teachers and learners, using each of these forms of knowledge in an intelligent, judicious, and critical manner.

Over time, we anticipate that evidence-based practices will play an ever increasing role in the process described above. This is inevitable as our knowledge about evidence-based writing practices expands. This brings us to the purpose of this special issue of Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal . This special issue presents 11 writing intervention studies focusing almost exclusively with students in the elementary grades. These studies were conducted in Europe and the United States, and they replicate and extend prior research conducted with young developing writers.

The special issue

Perhaps the most tested writing instructional practice of all time, and the one yielding the largest effects sizes (Graham et al., 2013 ), is the Self-regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model developed by Karen Harris (see Harris et al., 2008 for a description of this approach). Several studies in the current special issue tested specific iterations of the use of the SRSD model as a means for teaching writing to elementary grade students. Collins and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of teaching third grade students in the United States task specific strategies for planning and drafting expository essays using information from social studies text using this model. This instruction enhanced the quality of students’ texts and resulted in improvement on a norm-referenced measure of writing where students identified their favorite game and provided reasons why this was the case.

In a second SRSD study conducted with second and third grade children in Spain, Salas and her colleagues examined if teaching planning and drafting strategies for writing an opinion essay was equally effective with children from more and less disadvantaged backgrounds. SRSD was equally effective in improving the opinion writing of children from both backgrounds, but carryover effects to reading comprehension (a skill not taught in this study) only occurred for students from less disadvantaged backgrounds.

A third study by Rosario and his colleagues involved a secondary analysis of data from an investigation in Portugal where third grade students were taught to write narratives using SRSD procedures and a story writing tool they developed. Their reanalysis focused on students experiencing difficulties learning to write showing that they differed in their approach and perceptions of teacher feedback. The majority of these children were able to use the feedback provided by their teacher and viewed it as helpful.

A fourth investigation by Hebert and his colleagues taught fourth grade students in the United States to write informational text using five text structures (description, compare/contrast, sequence of events, problem–solution, and cause effect). While the authors did not indicate they used SRSD to teach these strategies, the teaching methods mirrored this approach. In any event, the instruction provided to these children enhanced how well they wrote all five of these different kinds of text. These effects, however, did not generalize to better reading performance.

Lopez and her colleagues in Spain examined three approaches to improving sixth grade students’ writing. Students in all three conditions were taught how to set communicative goals for their writing. Students in one treatment condition were taught a strategy for revising. Students in a second treatment condition observed a reader trying to comprehend a text and suggesting ways it might be improved. Control students continued with the goal setting procedures. Students in both treatment conditions improved their writing and revising skills more than control students, but there were no differences between these two treatments.

In another Spanish study conducted by Rodriguez-Malaga and colleagues, the impact of two different treatments on the writing of fourth grade students was examined. One treatment group learned how to set product goals for their writing, whereas the other writing treatment group learned how to set product goals and strategies for planning compare/contrast texts. Only the students in the product goal and planning strategy treatment evidenced improved writing when compared to control students.

Philippakos and Voggt examined the effectiveness of on-line practice-based professional development (PBPD) for teaching genre-based writing strategies. Eighty-four second grade teachers were randomly assigned to PBPD or a no-treatment control condition. Treatment teachers taught the genre-based writing strategies with high fidelity and rated PBPD positively. Even more importantly, their students writing evidenced greater improvement than the writing of students in control teachers’ classes.

Walter and her colleagues in England examined the effectiveness of two writing interventions, sentence combining and spelling instruction, with 7 to 10 year old children experiencing difficulties learning to write. As expected, sentence combining instruction improved sentence construction skills, but even more importantly, these researchers found that the degree of improvements in sentence writing was related to students’ initial sentence, spelling, and reading skills.

In another study focused on improving students’ sentence construction skills, Arfé and her colleagues in Italy examined the effectiveness of an oral language intervention to improve the sentence construction skills of fifth and tenth grade students. This oral treatment did enhance the sentence writing skills of the younger fifth grade students. This study provides needed evidence that interventions aimed at improving oral language skills transfer to writing.

Chung and his colleagues in the United States examined if sixth grade students’ writing can be improved through self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and self-reflection when they revised a timed, on-demand essay. These students as well as students in the control condition were also taught how to revise such an essay. Treatment students evidenced greater writing gains, and were more confident about their revising capabilities than control students.

Lastly, Graham and his colleagues in the United States examined if the revising behavior of fourth grade students experiencing difficulties with writing can be enhanced through the use of revising goals that focused attention on making substantive when revising stories (e.g., change the setting of the story). Applying such goals across four stories had a positive effect on the revising behavior of these students when these goals were not in effect, resulting in more text-level revisions, more revisions that changed the meaning of text, and more revisions rated as improving text.

The 11 intervention studies in this special issue of Reading & Writing are particularly noteworthy for several reasons. One, some of these studies ( n  = 4) concentrated on improving students’ skills in writing informational and expository text. This is an area that has not received enough attention in existing writing literature. Two, enhancing students’ revising was the goal of multiple studies ( n  = 4). Again, too little attention has been given to this topic with either younger or older students. Three, it was especially gratifying to see that a pair of studies examined how to enhance sentence writing skills. This has been a neglected area of writing research since the 1980s. Four, multiple studies focused on improving the writing of students who experienced difficulties learning to write ( n  = 3). This is an area where we need much more research if we are to maximize these students’ writing success. Finally, more than half of the studies in this special issue ( n  = 6) were conducted in Europe, with the other half conducted in the United States. It is important to examine if specific writing treatments are effective in different social, cultural, political, institutional, and historical context (Graham, 2018 ), as was done with the four studies that applied SRSD to teach students strategies for writing.

We hope you enjoy the studies presented here. We further hope they serve as a catalyst to improve your own research if you are a writing scholar or your teaching if you are a practitioner.

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Graham, S., Alves, R.A. Research and teaching writing. Read Writ 34 , 1613–1621 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10188-9

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Curriculum-Based Handwriting Programs: A Systematic Review With Effect Sizes

Courtney engel.

Courtney Engel, MOT, OTR, is Occupational Therapist, Chicago, IL. At the time of the research, she was Master’s Student, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Kristin Lillie

Kristin Lillie, MOT, OTR, is Occupational Therapist, Milwaukee, WI. At the time of the research, she was Master’s Student, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Sarah Zurawski

Sarah Zurawski, MSE, OTR/L, is Lecturer, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Brittany G. Travers

Brittany G. Travers, PhD, is Assistant Professor, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Assistant Professor, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison; ude.csiw@srevartb

Associated Data

A systematic review of evidence for the effectiveness of curriculum-based handwriting interventions (preschool to second grade) found evidence for improvements in handwriting legibility but not in speed or fluency.

Challenges with handwriting can have a negative impact on academic performance, and these challenges are commonly addressed by occupational therapy practitioners in school settings. This systematic review examined the efficacy of curriculum-based interventions to address children’s handwriting difficulties in the classroom (preschool to second grade). We reviewed and computed effect sizes for 13 studies (11 Level II, 2 Level III) identified through a comprehensive database search. The evidence shows that curriculum-based handwriting interventions resulted in small- to medium-sized improvements in legibility, a commonly reported challenge in this age group. The evidence for whether these interventions improved speed is mixed, and the evidence for whether they improved fluency is insufficient. No clear support was found for one handwriting program over another. These results suggest that curriculum-based interventions can lead to improvements in handwriting legibility, but Level I research is needed to validate the efficacy of these curricula.

Handwriting difficulties are observed in 10%–30% of school-age children with and without identified disabilities ( Feder & Majnemer, 2007 ). Children experiencing handwriting impairments tend to have lower achievement in mathematics, lower verbal IQ, and greater attention difficulties than their peers without impairments ( Sandler et al., 1992 ), resulting in decreased ability to interact and engage in classroom settings. Poor handwriting can also lead to limited compositional fluency ( Graham, Berninger, Weintraub, & Schafer, 1998 ), issues with taking legible notes and reading them later, and more time needed to finish assignments ( Graham, 1992 ). Moreover, handwriting impairments have been linked to reduced working memory capacity and lower reading and spelling scores ( McCarney, Peters, Jackson, Thomas, & Kirby, 2013 ), suggesting that handwriting challenges early in life may have cascading negative effects on learning and academic performance.

To address handwriting difficulties, several curriculum-based handwriting programs have been developed. These programs are taught within the classroom setting and are geared toward improving handwriting in all children, not just those exhibiting difficulties. Occupational therapy practitioners in the schools often facilitate these interventions; handwriting deficiencies are one of the primary causes for referral to occupational therapy among school-age children ( Barnes, Beck, Vogel, Grice, & Murphy, 2003 ).

Handwriting Without Tears (HWT; Olsen & Knapton, 2008 ), a developmentally and multisensory-based handwriting curriculum, can be implemented in the classroom by both teachers and occupational therapy practitioners. The Write Start program ( Case-Smith, Holland, & Bishop, 2011 ; Case-Smith, Holland, Lane, & White, 2012 ), another cotaught classroom-embedded intervention, is aimed at promoting writing fluency in grade school children of all ability levels. These and other curriculum-based programs (see Table 1 ) target handwriting performance in children’s classroom setting. The curriculum-based approach aligns with the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (Pub. L. 114-95) , a reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Pub. L. 107-110) , which allows schools to address the needs of all students but particularly focuses on children who are not meeting academic standards. Aligning handwriting interventions with classroom curricula is thought to promote greater generalization of skills to handwriting-based activities within the classroom.

Handwriting Curriculum-Based Interventions Examined in the Reviewed Studies

Despite the availability of curriculum-based programs, little research has been conducted on the efficacy of these interventions in improving handwriting performance. A previous systematic review found that handwriting interventions (a blend of both curriculum-based and non–curriculum-based programs) were effective when they provided sufficient time for handwriting practice ( Hoy, Egan, & Feder, 2011 ). However, this review did not specifically evaluate curriculum-based handwriting interventions, and the majority of the literature on curriculum-based programs has been published since the review.

Therefore, the objective of the current study was to systematically review the efficacy of curriculum-based handwriting programs in improving handwriting in classroom activities for children with and without identified disabilities. Combining our systematic review with effect size calculations from each study, we specifically aimed to examine (1) whether curriculum-based handwriting interventions in general made meaningful changes to children’s handwriting legibility, speed, and fluency; (2) whether specific curricula rendered the largest treatment effects; and (3) whether specific characteristics of curricula (e.g., age at intervention, length of intervention) led to more substantial treatment effects.

Search Strategy

We conducted a systematic search of the literature to identify curriculum-based handwriting interventions for children. The previous systematic review of handwriting interventions covered December 1978 to January 2010 ( Hoy et al., 2011 ). The current review included studies of curriculum-based handwriting interventions published from January 2006 to December 2015. Figure 1 shows the number of studies identified, screened, eligible for, and included in the systematic review. With the help of a medical librarian, our team systematically searched the following databases: PubMed, EBSCOhost (including Academic Search Premier), CINAHL Plus With Full Text, Education Full Text, ERIC, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Social Sciences Full Text, SocINDEX with full text, and OTseeker. For PubMed, key terms included child * and handwrit * and (intervention or therapy or program). For EBSCOhost, terms included child * (and handwrit * intervention or handwrit * program). For OTseeker, the broad term “handwriting” was used to encompass a wide range of articles. The searches were further narrowed by the use of filters, including peer-reviewed journal articles, publication within the past 10 yr, and clinical trials.

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Object name is 7203205010p1fig1.jpg

Flow diagram of articles identified, screened, eligible for, and included in the systematic review.

Figure format from “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: The PRISMA Statement,” by D. Moher, A. Liberati, J. Tetzlaff, and D. G. Altman; PRISMA Group, 2009, PLoS Medicine, 6 (6), e1000097. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000097

The search terms were developed to capture relevant articles and to ensure that the terms relevant to the specific thesaurus of each database were included. Additionally, the American Journal of Occupational Therapy was hand searched to ensure that all appropriate articles were included.

Selection Criteria

Articles selected for review included those that had used handwriting interventions and curriculum-based programs for children in preschool through fifth grade. We chose to exclude articles addressing children above the fifth-grade level to focus on the years when children typically learn handwriting fundamentals. We included studies of curriculum-based handwriting programs used for children both with and without identified disabilities, who together form the target population of these interventions. Other inclusion criteria were interventions that took place in a general education classroom, interventions longer than one session, and interventions with a clear beginning and end. Specific exclusion criteria were studies with adult participants, interventions implemented outside the classroom setting, and studies that lacked a distinguishable intervention. The studies used in our review were assessed for outcomes related to overall handwriting performance, such as legibility, writing speed, and fluency.

Effect Size Computations

Using the reported means and standard deviations published in each study, we calculated Hedge’s g using the compute.es package ( Del Re, 2013 ) in R ( R Core Team, 2015 ). Hedge’s g is an effect size measure that permits comparison of the size of the intervention effect across studies and measures. A Hedge’s g of 0.20 is considered a small effect, 0.50 is considered a medium effect, and 0.80 or greater is considered a large effect. Compared with Cohen’s d, Hedge’s g may provide a better estimate of effect size in small samples ( Grissom & Kim, 2005 ). In the case of repeated measures analyses, we followed the recommendations of Morris (2008) by calculating Hedge’s g for the pre–post change in each group and then subtracting the Hedge’s g for the control group from the Hedge’s g for the treatment group. Because this procedure did not account for repeated measures, it may have led to decreased estimates of effect sizes for these analyses. Positive effect sizes represent the size of effect in the expected direction (i.e., faster, more fluent, or more legible handwriting), whereas negative effect sizes represent the size of the effect in the unexpected direction (i.e., slower, less fluent, and less legible handwriting).

From the original search, we identified 252 studies matching our search terms. Of these studies, 99 were excluded because the titles did not include handwriting or children in preschool through fifth grade. Abstracts of the remaining 153 were screened, and 121 were excluded because of the absence of an explicit handwriting intervention or program (see Figure 1 ).

Supplemental Table 1 (available online at http://otjournal.net ; navigate to this article, and click on “Supplemental”) summarizes the 13 included studies. Levels of evidence were assigned on the basis of AOTA guidelines ( Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, & Richardson, 1996 ). There were 0 Level I studies, 10 Level II studies, 2 Level III studies, and 1 study we classified as Level II–III because it had two distinct intervention groups but no control. Several curricula were examined by the 13 studies, including Write Start ( Case-Smith, Holland, & Bishop, 2011 ), HWT ( Olsen, 2003 ; Olsen & Knapton, 2008 ), HWT–Get Set for School ( Olsen & Knapton, 2008 ), Peterson Directed Handwriting Curriculum ( Nelson, 2006 ), the Fine Motor and Early Writing Pre-K curriculum, the Size Matters Handwriting Program (SMHP; Moskowitz, 2009 ), Write Direction ( Taras, Brennan, Gilbert, & Eck Reed, 2011 ), and Handwriting Clubs ( Howe, Roston, Sheu, & Hinojosa, 2013 ). Table 1 presents a brief description of each curriculum.

Risk of Bias

Because the studies under review were nonrandomized, we assessed risk of bias according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA; Moher et al., 2009 ) guidelines using ROBINS–I ( Sterne et al., 2016 ). As seen in Supplemental Table 2 (available online), the majority of studies had low risk of bias across domains.

Effects of Level II Versus Level III Studies

Because Level III studies, by definition, do not have a control group, pre–post treatment effect sizes may be overestimated because they likely reflect not only improvements from the intervention but also maturation effects and benefits from completing the same or a similar measure twice. To examine whether the difference in effect sizes between the 10 Level II studies and the 3 Level III studies (including the Level II–III study) was robust, we contrasted the average effect sizes of the analyses. Level II studies had an average effect size of 0.32 (small to medium effect; range = −0.90 to 1.96), whereas Level III studies had an average effect size of 2.69 (very large effect; range = −0.19 to 9.98). The Level III effect sizes were on average eight times larger than the Level II effect sizes, suggesting that maturation effects play a large role in curriculum-based handwriting intervention research. Because of this large discrepancy, we report findings from all studies but effect sizes of only the Level II studies.

Effects of Curriculum-Based Handwriting Interventions

Handwriting legibility..

Handwriting legibility was measured as an outcome in 12 of the 13 studies. Quality was considered a proxy for handwriting legibility. Because letter formation is a main component of legibility ( Hammerschmidt & Sudsawad, 2004 ), letter formation was interpreted as legibility. Eight studies showed significant improvements in at least one component of legibility. Therefore, moderate evidence exists for improved handwriting legibility after curriculum-based handwriting programs. The reviewed interventions had an average effect size of 0.39 (range = 0.02 to 1.05), suggesting small to medium effects on legibility.

Handwriting Speed.

Nine of the 13 studies assessed handwriting speed or rate. Five of these studies found significant improvements in speed. However, 3 studies found no difference in speed, and Pfeiffer, Rai, Murray, and Brusilovskiy (2015) found that the intervention group became significantly slower after training than the control group. Therefore, the evidence is mixed regarding whether curriculum-based interventions enhance handwriting speed. The reviewed interventions had an average (mean) effect size on speed of 0.13 (range = −0.90 to 0.77). Because of the large range, we also calculated the median (0.22). Therefore, the intervention effects on handwriting speed were variable and, when averaged, were small to very small.

Handwriting Fluency.

Only 4 of the 13 studies assessed fluency, and all 4 investigated the Write Start program. Only 3 of these studies found significant differences in fluency at posttest. Because of the similarity of the studies and some inconsistencies in posttests, the evidence is insufficient for curriculum-based handwriting programs to improve fluency. Given the discrepancy in effect sizes of the 2 Level II studies that assessed fluency (range = −0.08 to 0.74), we did not calculate an average effect size.

Effects of Specific Curricula

We compared effect sizes for legibility and speed across the different curricula (see Figure 2 ). For legibility, an explicit handwriting program ( Kaiser, Albaret, & Doudin, 2011 ) had the largest effect size, but this study was the only one to use this intervention. SMHP ( Pfeiffer et al., 2015 ) and Write Start ( Case-Smith, Holland, & White, 2014 ; Case-Smith, Weaver, & Holland, 2014 ) on average had medium to large effects on legibility. The Fine Motor and Early Writing Pre-K Curriculum ( Donica, Goins, & Wagner, 2013 ), HWT ( Donica, 2015 ; Donica et al., 2013 ; Lust & Donica, 2011 ; Roberts, Derkach-Ferguson, Siever, & Rose, 2014 ; Salls, Benson, Hansen, Cole, & Pielielek, 2013 ), Write Direction ( Taras, Brennan, Gilbert, & Eck Reed, 2011 ), and intensive handwriting practice ( Howe, Roston, Sheu, & Hinojosa, 2013 ) all had small or very small effects on legibility. However, many of these studies used active and rigorous control conditions, which might have diminished the size of these effects.

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Effect sizes (Hedge’s g ) for legibility and speed, by curriculum.

Note. Effect sizes are interpreted as follows: 0.20 = small effect, 0.50 = medium effect, 0.80 = large effect. Negative effect sizes reflect intervention changes in the opposite-than-expected direction (i.e., slower handwriting after the intervention). HWT = Handwriting Without Tears; HWT–GSS = Handwriting Without Tears–Get Set for School; Pre-K = prekindergarten; VPM = visual–perceptual–motor training.

For speed, the explicit handwriting program ( Kaiser et al., 2011 ) had the largest effect size. Write Start ( Case-Smith et al., 2011 , 2012 ; Case-Smith, Holland, & White, 2014 ; Case-Smith, Weaver, & Holland, 2014 ) and intensive handwriting practice ( Howe et al., 2013 ) had small to medium effect sizes. Intriguingly, SMHP ( Pfeiffer et al., 2015 ) had a small to medium effect size but in the opposite direction, suggesting that this curriculum significantly enhanced legibility while promoting slower writing.

Effects of Specific Characteristics of Curricula

Age at instruction..

Effect sizes for legibility (17 effect sizes) and speed (8 effect sizes) were examined as a function of the grade at which the intervention took place (interventions that took place in Grades 1 and 2 were coded as 1.5). Legibility effects showed a medium-sized but not significant correlation with age at instruction, r = .33, p = .25. Speed effects did not vary according to age at instruction, r = −.06, p = .89.

Instruction Length.

The length of intervention varied across studies; however, all interventions lasted a minimum of 6 wk. The majority of handwriting programs lasted ≥12 wk and yielded handwriting improvements in at least one of the specified outcome areas. Given the variability in session time and frequency across interventions, we calculated an estimate of the total number of hours of intervention for each of the studies. Total hours of intervention ranged from 6 hr ( Donica et al., 2013 ) to 90 hr ( Donica, 2015 ), with the latter occurring over a 2-yr time span. Omitting the 90-hr intervention outlier, total intervention hours were not correlated with the effect sizes for legibility, r = .27, p = .37, or speed, r = −.11, p = .79.

This systematic review aimed to examine the evidence for curriculum-based handwriting interventions to improve handwriting legibility, speed, and fluency. From our extensive literature search, 13 curriculum-based handwriting studies met inclusion criteria for review (10 Level II studies and 3 Level III studies). Conspicuously, there were no randomized controlled trials (Level I evidence). Our systematic review rendered two major findings: (1) Curriculum-based handwriting interventions in general demonstrated small to medium effects in improving legibility, and (2) although certain programs may be better suited for targeting speed versus legibility, other characteristics of the programs (i.e., age at intervention and hours of intervention) did not appear to influence efficacy.

Efficacy of Curriculum-Based Handwriting Interventions

The findings suggest that curriculum-based handwriting interventions can successfully elicit small- to medium-sized improvements in legibility. Although the size of these effects was not large, even small gains in legibility may be important because poor handwriting legibility can greatly compromise a child’s functioning in school and lead to lower grades ( Graham, Harris, & Fink, 2000 ; Schneck & Amundson, 2010 ). These effect sizes may have been smaller than expected because many of the reviewed studies implemented active control groups (handwriting was taught, but in a different way) rather than passive control groups. Using an active control group is more rigorous but may result in underestimation of the size of the intervention effect.

In contrast, curriculum-based interventions did not appear to enhance handwriting speed. Speed effect sizes varied greatly, and the average speed effect size was small. One possible explanation is that when legibility and form are emphasized in a curriculum, slower handwriting production may result. Indeed, several studies demonstrated that when legibility improved, speed declined or showed no improvement ( Howe et al., 2013 ; Roberts, Siever, & Mair, 2010 ; Weintraub & Graham, 1998 ). Another possible explanation is that improvements in letter quality may be observed before improvements in speed because of the additional practice time needed for speed to develop ( Hoy et al., 2011 ). Consequently, speed effects may not be as evident in studies that focus on young learners.

Writing fluency was a variable of interest because the end goal of efficient handwriting is to allow children to focus on higher order aspects of writing. However, not enough studies measured fluency to be able to draw conclusions. This is a critical gap in the literature and a key avenue for future research because writing fluency likely reflects the more functional aspects of handwriting ability.

Program Characteristics That Demonstrated the Highest Efficacy

We calculated effect sizes for all studies in the systematic review to supplement our interpretation of the literature. This allowed us not only to estimate effect sizes across the whole body of evidence but also to compare effects across different curricula, ages, and lengths of intervention.

An important question has been whether one type of curriculum-based handwriting intervention outperforms the others. In other words, does it matter which curriculum a school uses? From our comparison of effect sizes, no one handwriting program appeared to outperform the other programs across all domains. Intriguingly, the Write Start program and the explicit handwriting program from Kaiser et al. (2011) were the only programs to have non–small effects on both legibility and speed. However, other programs had medium to large effect sizes in each of those domains (just not consistently across domains). Therefore, different programs may excel at targeting different outcomes.

In an ideal situation, the needs of the children in the classroom would dictate which curriculum is used. For example, our results suggest that SMHP may be best for classrooms for which the primary goal is legibility but not speed. Alternatively, for classrooms for which the primary goal is handwriting speed, the explicit handwriting program from Kaiser et al. (2011) , Write Start, or the intensive handwriting program from Howe et al. (2013) might be best suited.

We also used the effect sizes to examine the ideal length of intervention, and we found that more intervention hours did not appear to lead to substantially larger handwriting improvements. This finding suggests that 6 wk of intervention may be sufficient, even though a previous review of curriculum-based and non-curriculum-based handwriting interventions suggested that handwriting interventions should occur at least two times per week for a minimum of 20 sessions to be effective ( Hoy et al., 2011 ).

Interestingly, we found that the grade at which the intervention occurred had a nonsignificant but medium to large relation to how big the intervention-based legibility effects were, which suggests a trend for older grades to be associated with larger effects. Although this association was not statistically significant and should be interpreted with extreme caution, the size of the effects for different ages and grades might be useful in designing future research.

Limitations

A limitation of this review is that no Level I studies met inclusion criteria, restricting our ability to draw firm conclusions on the efficacy of curriculum-based handwriting interventions. The lack of Level I studies may be attributable to the fact that curriculum-based interventions, by definition, take place in the classroom, preventing random assignment of students to one condition or another. However, a large-scale study that randomly assigns different classrooms to the intervention or control condition would provide higher levels of evidence in support of curriculum-based interventions.

Another limitation is that our calculation of effect sizes did not account for repeated measures, which may have led to decreased estimates of effect sizes. We chose this as a conservative approach, but some of the effects may be underestimated. Other limitations include inconsistency in definitions of handwriting components (e.g., legibility), limited descriptions of participants, and lack of long-term follow-up in the studies reviewed.

Implications for Occupational Therapy Practice

The results of this study have the following implications for occupational therapy practice:

  • Curriculum-based handwriting programs, in general, appear to successfully target legibility in preschool, kindergarten, and young school-age children.
  • Specific curriculum-based handwriting programs may be better at targeting speed than legibility (or vice versa) and ideally should be selected on the basis of whether the primary need of the classroom is handwriting speed or legibility.
  • For the majority of children, 6 wk (∼15 hr) was enough to make gains in legibility. However, children with handwriting challenges may need more time. Future research is needed to determine the ideal length of curriculum-based handwriting programs.
  • A key need exists for future Level I research to examine curriculum-based handwriting.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental material, acknowledgments.

This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant U54 HD090256 to the Waisman Center), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD Young Investigator Award to B.G.T.), and the Hartwell Foundation (to B.G.T.). We thank Karla Ausderau and Lauren Bishop-Fitzpatrick for their insights and help with this systematic review. We also thank Michael Venner for his expertise and assistance with our database search.

* Indicates articles included in the systematic review.

Contributor Information

Courtney Engel, Courtney Engel, MOT, OTR, is Occupational Therapist, Chicago, IL. At the time of the research, she was Master’s Student, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Kristin Lillie, Kristin Lillie, MOT, OTR, is Occupational Therapist, Milwaukee, WI. At the time of the research, she was Master’s Student, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Sarah Zurawski, Sarah Zurawski, MSE, OTR/L, is Lecturer, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Brittany G. Travers, Brittany G. Travers, PhD, is Assistant Professor, Occupational Therapy Program, Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Assistant Professor, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison; ude.csiw@srevartb .

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TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 1: Research-Based Writing Instruction

About writing instruction.

Recent reviews of research have gathered what we know about effective practices to teach writing. Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007b), and a companion analysis, “What We Know and What We Still Need to Know” (Graham & Perin, 2007a), examine the research on writing instruction in grades 4–12, with attention given to those whose writing skills need improvement. Writing to Read (Graham & Hebert, 2010) analyzes the research on how writing instruction and practice can improve reading skills. Although these studies focus on students younger than most of the adult education population, they provide direction for instruction with adults. This fact sheet provides a thumbnail sketch of these three major studies and the implications for adult educators and learners.

Elements of Writing

Writing is multifaceted and includes a number of skills that must work together. Evaluating writing can be subjective when instructors and learners alike are unsure of what makes “good” writing. Writing “quality” is defined in Writing Next as “coherently organized essays containing well developed and pertinent ideas, supporting examples, and appropriate detail” (Graham & Perin, 2007b, p. 14). Sentence structure and vocabulary are other key elements that contribute to the quality of a piece of writing. Learners who find writing difficult may experience challenges in any of these areas as well as in spelling, handwriting, prior knowledge of the topic, and familiarity with models of academic literacies or genres. Because writing is such a complex act, high-quality writing depends on this large constellation of skills and abilities. The goal of writing instruction is to help writers become flexible; proficient; and able to adapt to various purposes, contexts, and formats, and, in so doing, to synergize literacy development in both writing and reading.

Why Teach Writing to Adult Learners?

Adults encounter writing tasks on a daily basis, especially informational or expository writing such as notes to children’s teachers, grocery lists, work activity logs and forms, emails to family and co-workers, online service forms, and so on. The pervasiveness of writing in daily life underscores the need for learners and their instructors to focus on helping adults become flexible, confident writers.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that many adults of all ages in America are not flexible, confident writers. Writing Next and Writing to Read provide grim statistics showing that poor in-school performance and high drop-out rates from high school lead to a situation in which adults are underprepared for postsecondary education or successful employment. For example, they report that nearly a quarter of community college registrants show the need for developmental writing instruction. Similarly, the reports document that the writing demands of most jobs—even at the entry level—are increasing and businesses may have to provide the remedial writing instruction that workers need. Preparing adult students for further education or work advancement requires that adult educators help learners improve their writing skills and increase their confidence in their ability to write.

What’s the Research?

Writing Next and Writing to Read are metaanalyses, that is, large-scale statistical reviews of studies that compare treatment and control groups. A metaanalysis allows researchers to combine multiple studies of a single instructional intervention and report “effect sizes” as an effectiveness measure. An effect size tells whether statistically significant findings are also educationally meaningful. Writing Next analyzed 142 studies and Writing to Read analyzed 93 studies. What We Know extends the conclusions of Writing Next by reviewing articles that did not fit the strict inclusion criteria, including 48 single-subject studies of writing, many of which were focused on students who had learning disabilities or were otherwise low achieving. Because there is very little rigorous research on the effectiveness of literacy interventions for adult learners, it is necessary to refer to studies with younger students. The challenge for the adult education community is to extrapolate from reports on younger students and apply these findings in instructional design for adults. We already know, for example, that many native English speaking adult learners were low-achieving students in K–12 and many have undiagnosed learning disabilities (Corley & Taymans, 2002; National Institute for Literacy, 2009). We also know from adult learning theory that adults show different learning patterns and levels of motivation from adolescents and younger children, and it is necessary to take these differences into account when drawing from work with younger populations to plan for instruction with adults. There are also some studies of writing development in adults and youth in postsecondary settings that fill in some of the gaps and help us develop approaches to helping adults improve their writing abilities.

Recommended Instructional Strategies

All three reports find that writing instruction should emphasize explicit, direct, and systematic instruction with many opportunities for learners to engage in meaningful, extended writing. Learners who wish to improve their writing skills will benefit from learning strategies, and from assistance given by peers, mentors, and technology tools.

Writing Next, What We Know , and Writing to Read found the following instructional interventions to be effective. Those that are especially helpful for low-achieving writers are noted. This TEAL Center Fact Sheet offers in italics suggestions for contextualizing instruction in the adult education setting.

  • Strategy instruction , especially self-regulated strategy development (SRSD), and summarization described below, are the most effective approaches identified in these reports. Writers who are explicitly taught strategies that are reinforced in class over time can internalize these strategies and draw on them for support when writing. Strategies replace negative self-talk with positive self-instructions to help students overcome frustration and past failure. Strategy instruction has been introduced to adult education through the professional development programs , Bridges to Practice and Learning to Achieve, developed by the National Institute for Literacy to address the needs of students with learning disabilities. It is an instructional approach that requires professional development and practice leading to instruction that is consistent and explicit.
  • Summarization . Explicit teaching of the elements of a summary of a text leads to improved ability and increased confidence in writing summaries. Having learners write summaries about what they read is a key recommendation from Writing to Read . In addition, summarization is an increasingly common expectation as students advance in their education and are assigned more complex texts to read and comprehend. Connect this instruction and practice with increasingly complex texts to reinforce learners’ comprehension as well as writing skills.
  • Collaborative writing . Making arrangements for students to work together through the entire process of writing—planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing—results in higher quality writing products. Use technology to support and share writing, especially for classes that do not meet daily, or assign writing as an out-of-class activity.
  • Setting specific product goals . Understanding the nature of goals for a written product, setting the goal in advance during planning, and then monitoring and editing one’s work for adherence to the goal all result in higher quality final products. Specific goals (e.g., “to persuade a voter”) are more effective than general goals (e.g., “write a 200-word essay”). Discuss writing quality with learners and identify areas for improvement. Help learners set explicit goals to guide their writing, and work with them to track progress. For example, learners may want to write more words during a Quick or Free Write exercise; others may identify that their sentences are all of a similar type and want to focus on adding variety and using combined sentences. Tracking goals works!
  • Word processing and other technology tools are especially supportive for struggling writers, providing the means to move more easily from idea to composition, supporting spelling, revising, and proof reading. Technology-assisted writing also makes collaborative writing (see above) more feasible and productive.
  • Sentence combining , that is, practicing how to combine two simple sentences into a compound or complex sentence, has a positive impact on overall writing quality and can boost learners’ reading comprehension skills as well. Use this technique in conjunction with other effective writing techniques, such as encouraging peer discussion as part of collaborative writing, to help reinforce the practice.
  • Prewriting activities , or brainstorming before beginning to draft a composition, has a positive impact on the final written product. Prewriting activities can be done individually or as a collaborative process. This planning strategy may be particularly important to low-achieving writers for compensating and overcoming documented weak prior knowledge and vocabulary (Graham & Perin, 2007). Engaging learners and supporting vocabulary development and background knowledge through pre reading strategies can support writing about the topic, too. Generate lists, word webs, and personal glossaries that can help writers demonstrate what they know.
  • Inquiry , in which learners engage in a focused investigation with “immediate and concrete data” (Graham & Perin, 2007a, p. 19) that they gather and analyze, is a springboard to higher quality writing. Assign authentic activities and materials as inquiry writing, either inquiry in the community (i.e., is there consensus for the public library to expand?) and/or online as a web quest.
  • Process writing approach includes many related activities, including a greatly increased quantity of writing (only some of which is completed to publication) and a focus on writing throughout the course, along with mini-lessons on embedded skills. It is a professional development model as well, and results seen in students’ writing are correlated to teachers’ training in the approach. It is worth noting that the instructional activities of sentence combining and inquiry are part of the approach. Another key component is the modeling of writing by instructors. Model writing and responding to feedback and model applying the strategies you teach. Many adult educators have participated in local National Writing Project chapters; see www.nwp.org for a local chapter that can offer professional development and a community of writers.
  • Study of written models with direct, guided practice was found to be an effective instructional strategy, especially for students with low skills. Many adult education students are not familiar with different types of written genres; the explicit study of formats, styles, tones, vocabularies, sentence structures, etc., can provide new frames and words for their own work.

A cautionary note about grammar instruction emerges from the meta-analyses: Studies of grammar instruction alone or as a primary writing instructional approach produced negative results for students’ overall writing quality. However, the authors argue that it is important to teach grammar. It seems most helpful to the learner to use grammar approaches that involve active learning (such as sentence combination) and are integrated with other writing activities.

Corley, M. A., & Taymans, J. (2002). Adults with learning disabilities: A review of the literature. Review of adult learning and literacy (Vol. 3). Boston: National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy. Retrieved December 27, 2011, from http://www.ncsall.net/?id=575

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. A. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Repor t. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007a). What we know and what we still need to know: Teaching adolescents to write. Scientific Studies of Reading , 11 (4), 313–335.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007b). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high school . Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

National Institute for Literacy. (2009). Learning to achieve: A review of the research literature on serving adults with learning disabilities . Washington, DC: Author.

Authors: TEAL Center staff

Reviewed by: Dolores Perin, Columbia University

About the TEAL Center: The Teaching Excellence in Adult Literacy (TEAL) Center is a project of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE), designed to improve the quality of teaching in adult education in the content areas.

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A new, streamlined version of Intervention Central is coming in December 2023. The new site will eliminate user login accounts. If you have a login account, be sure to download and save any documents of importance from that account, as they will be erased when the website is revised.

  • Academic Interventions
  • Behavior Interventions
  • CBM/Downloads

How To: Master Spelling or Sight Words: Cover-Copy-Compare

This intervention promotes the acquisition of spelling or sight words. The  student is given a sheet containing words to practice.

Attachments

  • Download This Intervention in PDF Format: How To: Master Spelling or Sight Words: Cover-Copy-Compare
  • Cover-Copy-Compare Worksheet: Spelling
  • Cover-Copy-Compare: Log Sheet
  • Carter, S. L., Won, C., & Mayton, M. R. (2013). Enhancing foreign language competency using the cover, copy, compare technique: An exploratory evaluation. Education and Treatment of Children, 36(2), 105-116.
  • Joseph, L. M., Konrad, M., Cates, G., Vajcner, T., Eveleigh, E., & Fishley, K. M. (2011). A meta-analytic review of the cover-copy-compare and variations of this self-management procedure. Psychology in the Schools, 49(2), 122-136.
  • Skinner, C. H., Bamberg, H. W., Smith, E. S., & Powell, S. S. (1993). Cognitive cover, copy, and compare: Subvocal responding to increase rates of accurate division responding. Remedial and Special Education, 14(1), 49-56.
  • Skinner, C. H., McLaughlin, T. F., & Logan, P. (1997). Cover, copy, and compare: A self-managed academic intervention effective across skills, students, and settings. Journal of Behavioral Education, 7, 295-306.

Writing Instruction: Effective Elements

Spelling: repeated review of spelling words with shared rime.

DESCRIPTION: The student practices the reading and spelling of words from word families that have similar pronunciation and shared spelling patterns (rimes) (adapted from Conrad, 2

  • Student Sheet: Spelling Words with Shared Rime
  • Recording Sheet: Repeated Review of Spelling Words with Shared Rime
  • Conrad, N. J. (2008). From reading to spelling and spelling to reading: Transfer goes both ways. Journal of Educational Psychology, 100 , 869-878.

Conrad, N. J. (2008). From reading to spelling and spelling to reading: Transfer goes both ways. Journal of Educational Psychology, 100, 869-878.

Spelling: Self-Correction with Verbal Cues

DESCRIPTION: The student takes a brief spelling pre-test, follows a self-guided process to check and correct spelling errors using verbal cues, and then takes a spelling post-test

  • Spelling Sheet: Self-Correction with Verbal Cues
  • Spelling Self-Correction with Verbal Cues: Student Reminder Checklist
  • [Optional] Spelling: Self-Correction with Verbal Cues: Recording Form
  • [Optional] Spelling Log: Mastered Words
  • Gettinger, M. (1985). Effects of teacher-directed versus student-directed instruction and cues versus no cues for improving spelling performance. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 18 , 167-171.

Sentence Combining: Teaching Rules of Sentence Structure by Doing

  • Sentence Combining: Explanation & Examples
  • Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective  strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools -  A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC Alliance  for Excellent Education.
  • Robinson, L. K., & Howell, K. W. (2008). Best practices in  curriculum-based evaluation & written expression. In A. Thomas &  J. Grimes (Eds.), Best practices in school psychology V (pp. 439-452).  Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.
  • Saddler, B. (2005). Sentence combining: A sentence-level writing intervention. The Reading Teacher, 58, 468-471.
  • Strong, W. (1986). Creative approaches to sentence combining.  Urbana, OL: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skill &  National Council of Teachers of English.

School-Wide Strategies for Managing... WRITING

Jim's hints.

How To' Strategy Sheets on Writing Topics. You can find a library of well-written strategy sheets on advanced writing topics such as defining audience, reorganizing drafts, and making transitions between sections of a paper. The site is sponsored by the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina.

Articles on Writing Instruction. This page contains links to articles on such topics as helping children with disabilities to access skills required for effective writing, employing instruction in memory techniques to teach writing, and the uses of computer-assisted writing instruction. The page is sponsored by the Access Center.

College Writing Center Directory . Some of the best on-line resources for writing instruction and intervention come from college and university writing centers. This page from Purdue University's Writing Lab provides a directory of links to writing centers across the nation and in other parts of the world.

Writing Interventions: A Collaborative Project. Part of a larger collection of intervention ideas, this page contains practical suggestions to improve writing instruction. 'The CSSS Project' is a collaboration between the Illinois State University Departments of School Psychology and Special Education and the Peoria (IL) School District.

Writing Skills Checklist. This 'Writing Skills Checklist' from Intervention Central allows intervention teams to inventory the student's mastery of the components of good writing--including the physical production of writing, mechanics and conventions, content and preparation, and the production and revision of drafts. The checklist also provides intervention ideas to address identified writing problems.

Integrated Writing Instruction

Students with writing disabilities typically find the act of writing to be both difficult and unrewarding.

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Tech & Learning

New Research: 16 Writing Interventions That Work

N ew research highlights that when it comes to writing instruction for middle and high school students, it’s important to get it, well , right.

“It does matter what you do when you teach writing because some things don't appear to work so well,” says Steve Graham, lead author of a new analysis of writing interventions (or “treatments”) for students in grades 6-12. 

The meta-analysis was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology and used data from 406 previous experiments involving 52,529 students. While no interventions studied in this analysis had a negative effect on writing outcomes, some interventions didn’t have significant positive effects. For instance, “Just simply increasing how much students write in middle school or high school does not improve their writing,” Graham says.

On the bright side, however, many interventions did help students improve their writing, and writing practice paired with enhanced instruction could make a significant difference. 

In their analysis, Graham and his co-authors identified 16 categories of writing interventions that had a positive impact on student writing and can serve as a guide to writing instructors. However, Graham cautions even though analysis of this kind provides teachers with tools that have a proven track record, there are no guarantees these strategies will work in all instances. 

“Just because a writing practice worked in eight other teachers' classrooms and had a positive effect, it does not mean that it is for certain going to work in your classroom,” he says. “Because the conditions under which research studies are conducted are different from the ones that may exist in an individual teachers’ classroom.” 

That’s why Graham advises instructors to use these 16 writing interventions as inspiration and to keep monitoring and adjusting their own practices based on what is and isn’t working for their students. 

Note : This study, like most education studies, measured effect sizes in standard deviation , which is the average deviation from the mean score for a group of students studied. In education research, effect sizes are notoriously small, so anything approaching a standard deviation of 1 is significant. For instance, a student with a 1.5 below the mean would require significant intervention.

1. Comprehensive Writing Programs  

Standard deviation: 0.47

These programs include those based on the process approach to writing, or what is sometimes called a writers’ workshop. Graham and his co-authors note this includes “extended opportunities for writing; writing for real audiences; engaging in cycles of planning, translating, and reviewing; personal responsibility and ownership of writing projects; high levels of student interactions and creation of a supportive writing environment; self-reflection and evaluation; personalized individual assistance and instruction; and, in some instances, systematic instruction.” 

2. Strategy Instruction  

Standard deviation: 0.76

This method of writing instruction involves explicitly teaching strategies for planning, revising, self-assessing, and/or editing text, the study authors note. Writing strategies range from processes, such as semantic webs to strategies designed for specific types of writing, such as stories. 

3. Digital Writing Tools  

Standard Deviation: 0.31

When students moved from using pen and paper to writing with the help of a traditional word processor over time, there was a marked improvement, Graham says. “The reasons for that are fairly obvious,” he adds. It’s easier to self-edit and move words around, and grammar and spellcheckers also help with the process. An even greater improvement was seen among students who had access to more advanced word processors, which might include the ability to add images and sound, or have gamified elements to help students learn to write. 

4. Transcription Instruction  

Standard deviation: 0.71

This positive effect was seen in lessons that included teaching spelling, handwriting, or keyboard use.

5. Computer-Assisted Instruction  

Standard deviation: 0.32

This included teaching writing, spelling, and other lessons with the help of a computer program as well as technology provided personalized instruction. However, computer-generated feedback on writing, in and of itself, did not provide a benefit, Graham says. This research predated the rapid advances in generative AI over the past year, so computer-assisted benefits and limitations will need to be updated in the future. 

6. Teaching Critical/Creative Thinking Skills for Writing  

Standard deviation: 0.27 

Teaching students critical thinking strategies improved writing as did teaching them how to add more creativity to their work. “Creativity could be exemplified in a study in which students were taught how to use metaphors, similes, etc., and critical thinking could be shown in a study in which students are analyzing their texts using questions that help them think critically about the veracity and value of the content they're looking at,” Graham says. 

7. Emulating Good Models of Writing

Standard deviation: 0.46

Graham and his co-authors defined this as, “Examining one or more examples of model texts or models for carrying out writing processes and attempting to emulate these models when writing.” This is something many professional writers do intuitively, so it makes sense that it would help with student writers. 

8. Feedback  

Standard deviation: 0.34

“We found feedback makes a difference,” Graham says. This included instructor feedback as well as peer and group feedback but notably not self-assessment/feedback or computer-generated feedback, at least in the studies looked at for this analysis. 

9. Goal Setting  

Standard deviation: 0.44

Whether teacher-assigned or based on students’ own goals for for writing or learning writing skills and processes, goal setting seemed to have a measurable impact on writing success. 

10. Prewriting Activities

Standard deviation: 0.49

“If you engage students in prewriting activities to gather or organize information – so it might involve discussion, or using some kind of organizer to generate and organize your ideas – writing gets better,” Graham says. 

11. Grammar Instruction 

Standard deviation: 0.77 

This positive association was much stronger than in some previous research into grammar’s impact on writing, including work Graham has been involved in. He says the change is likely due to better methodology that eliminated less well-designed grammar interventions as well as other factors. Most of the studies involve teaching grammar in context, he adds. So it was not the old form of grammar instruction that involved fill-in-the-blanks exercises and decontextualized practice around specific contexts. 

12. Sentence Instruction  

Standard deviation: 0.73

“We found that teaching students how to create more complex sentences had a positive effect on students’ writing,” he says. “When you write a lot of your cognitive efforts and resources are engaged in taking your ideas, images, etc, and translating them into an acceptable sentence that conveys your intended meaning, and is going to be understandable to the reader. So when you teach kids to be more facile with construction, then there's a positive effect on your writing.”  

13. Inquiry  

Standard deviation: 0.92

“We don't have as much data on this, but the idea behind inquiry is that you're gathering information that you're analyzing, that will help you in terms of your writing assignments,” Graham says. The study notes this could include comparing and contrasting cases or collecting and evaluating evidence.

14. Observing Writers/Readers, Peer Assistance  

Standard deviation: 0.41

Simply observing other writers, readers of writing, or teachers/peers as they model how to go about a writing process or skill, can also improve writing outcomes. 

15. Summarization Instruction

This can take the form of either sharing summarization strategies or direct instruction in which you present a summary, you discuss it, your students practice, and you get feedback, Graham says.

16. Text Structure Instruction  

Standard deviation: 0.39

Graham and his co-authors defined this as strategies in which teachers explicitly teach students knowledge about the purpose and/or structure of specific types of text, such as stories or persuasive texts. Once again, few writing instructors will be surprised this is an effective method. 

  • Khanmigo’s Academic Essay Feedback Tool Can Help Make Writing Instruction More Accessible, Sal Khan says
  • 4 Tips for STEM Writing

 New Research: 16 Writing Interventions That Work

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Writing Interventions for Children in Grades One to Six with Learning Disabilities

Print Resource

Breanna Lawrence and Gina Harrison

Teacher helping a student learn to write

Introduction

Learning to write presents significant challenges for children with learning disabilities (LDs) who have difficulties acquiring the basic literacy skills that are the building blocks for writing. Problems representing and manipulating sounds in oral language (phonemic processing), grasping the alphabetic principle (i.e., that sounds are symbolically represented in alphabetic languages by letters) and knowledge of letter-sound connections are all basic skills with which children with LDs struggle, impacting both reading and writing development. Writing is multidimensional, comprised of lower-level transcription (spelling, handwriting) and higher-level text generation (planning, organizing, revising) components. Due to their basic skills difficulties, children with LDs struggle with the transcription demands of writing often at the expense of communicating their ideas. Writing tasks are frustrating, onerous, and for many children with LDs, provoke significant anxiety. Struggling writers are more likely to become good writers with instruction and support during the elementary grades, before the difficulties become entrenched (Graham & Harris, 2005). The most effective writing interventions, based on the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model (e.g., Santangelo, Harris, & Graham, 2007), target the multiple dimensions of the writing process via a particular strategy, usually represented by a mnemonic ( click here for more about mnemonics ), such as POW ( P ick my ideas; O rganize my notes; W rite and say more) with an instructional focus on the student’s affect, motivation, and regulation of the writing process. The effectiveness of SRSD interventions is related to  its systematic and structured approach in helping students break down the writing task into manageable and attainable components leading to enhanced motivation to write. Teachers scaffold students by working collaboratively, helping the student to move toward independence in applying the strategy to write.

The Supporting Research

An extensive body of research has demonstrated that SRSD consistently increases content knowledge, writing quality, strategic behaviour, self-regulation skills, self-efficacy, and motivation among students of varying ages and ability levels (Graham & Harris, 2003). Gersten and Baker’s (2001) meta-analysis summarized the research (13 experimental or quasi-experimental design studies) on improving the content of expressive writing for students in grades one to nine with LDs. The vast majority of studies were conducted with elementary-aged students. Findings from the study suggested that teaching writing strategies to students with LDs can result in considerable benefits in writing quality. Explicit instruction in transcription skills (i.e. spelling and handwriting) and teaching writing strategies was found to improve overall writing ability by a greater degree than if instruction focused on improving content quality or mechanical aspects alone (see Edwards, 2003 for a review). Research indicates that handwriting and spelling instruction is necessary to ameliorate early transcription problems and prevent future writing difficulties (Baker et al., 2003; Berninger et al., 1997). In a recent case study, Milford and Harrison (2010) provide a detailed case-study of the efficacy of an SRSD intervention with a struggling 12-year old writer. A key component of this study was the combination of the “have-a-go” spelling, which tracked the student’s improvement in text spelling over time, along with the higher level strategies for text generation. Programs focusing on transcription skills in writing are included in the Where to Learn More section below.

More recently, self-regulated strategy development has been shown to be effective with  diverse populations of elementary school aged children, including minority, rural, and other students attending urban schools primarily serving low-income families (Graham et al., 2005; Harris et al., 2005; Lane et al., 2010; Lieneman et al., 2006; Saddler, 2006). Using a multiple case-study design, Sinclair (2014) recently reported the effectiveness of an SRSD intervention for children with epilepsy and co-occurring learning difficulties.

Implications for practice:

  • A combined focus, embedding strategies to support spelling and handwriting accuracy and fluency in combination with a focus on the recursive steps of generating writing content is critical for elementary-age children.
  • SRSD can be applied across genres as students progress from narrative to expository and persuasive texts.
  • SRSD can be combined with assistive technology like speech recognition software.
  • SRSD can be used in whole-class, small group, or on-on-one instructional contexts.

Implementing an SRSD Approach in your Classroom

There are six stages of the SRSD model that are flexible, frequently re-ordered, combined, modified, and repeated in order to meet the needs of students and teachers (Graham & Harris, 2005). Table 1 illustrates the six SRSD stages with brief descriptions (see Graham & Harris for extensive descriptions of each stage).

Table 1.  Six Instructional Stages of SRSD (Graham & Harris, 2005)

Based on the research, three areas of evidence-based instructional approaches are stressed: 1) explicitly teach the steps in the process of writing a quality essay or narrative; 2) improve quality through feedback and elaborated dialogue; and 3) teach students to understand different text structures and their relationships to genres (Baker et al., 2003).

Table 2 provides a summary of several empirically validated SRSD approaches for elementary students with LDs.

Table 2. Current Peer reviewed research on SRSD writing strategies for elementary students with LDs

Where to Learn More

Helpful book for teachers with lesson plans: Harris, K.R., Graham, S., Mason, L. & Friedlander, B. (2008). Powerful writing strategies for all students . Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

Two interactive tutorials on SRSD are available through Vanderbilt University. Click here to access the first tutorial. Click here to access the second tutorial.

Instructional resources for transcription:

  • CASL Handwriting program (Grade 1) complete program with lesson plans available through Vanderbilt University. Click here to access the program.
  • Berninger, V. & Abbott, S. P. (2003). Process Assessment of the Learner: Research-Based Reading and Writing Lessons.  PsychCorp.

Baker, S., Gersten, R., & Graham, S. (2003). Teaching expressive writing to students with learning disabilities: Research-based applications and examples. J Learn Disabil, 36, 109-126.

Berninger, V., Vaughn, K., Abbott, R., Abbott, S., Rogan, L., Brooks, A., et al. (1997).

Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers: Transfer from handwriting to composition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 652–666.

Dunn, M. W. (2011). Ask, reflect, text: Illustrating story plans with art. Journal of Research in  Childhood Education, 25 (4), 376-389.

Dunn, M. W. (2012). Response to intervention: Employing a mnemonic-strategy with art media to help struggling writers. Journal of International Education and Leadership, 2(1), 1-12.

Dunn, M. W., Tudor, D., Scattergood, C., & Closson, S. (2010). Ask, reflect, text: A narrative story-writing strategy. Childhood Education, 87 (2), 98-105.

Edwards, L. (2003). Writing instruction in kindergarten: Examining an emerging area of research for children with writing and reading difficulties. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 36 (2) ,136-148.

Ennis, R. P., Jolivette, K., & Boden, L. J. (2013). STOP and DARE: Self-regulated strategy development for persuasive writing with elementary students with E/EB in a residential facility. Education and Treatment of Children, 36(3), 81-99.

Fidalgo, R., Torrance, M., & Garcia, J. (2008). The long-term effects of strategy-focused writing instruction for grade six students. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 33 , 672-693.

Gersten, R., & Baker, S. (2001). Teaching expressive writing to students with learning disabilities: A meta-analysis. The Elementary School Journal, 101(3), 251-272.

Glasser, C., & Brunstein, J. C. (2007). Improving fourth-grade students’ composition skills: Effects of strategy instruction and self-regulation procedures. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99 , 297-310.

Graham, S. & Harris, K. R. (2003). Students with learning disabilities and the process of writing: A Meta-analysis of SRSD studies. In Swanson, H. L., Harris, K.R., and Graham, S. (Eds.), Handbook of learning disabilities (p. 323-344). New York: The Guilford Press.

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (2005). Writing better: Effective strategies for teaching students with  learning difficulties. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing Company.

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Mason, L. (2005). Improving the writing performance, knowledge, and self-efficacy of struggling young writers: The effects of self-regulated strategy development. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 30 , 207-241.

Harris, K. R., Graham, S., & Mason, L. H. (2006). Improving the writing, knowledge, and motivation for struggling young writers: Effects of self-regulated strategy development with and without peer support. American Educational Research Journal, 43 , 295-340.

Lane, K. L., Harris, K., Graham, S., Weisenbach, J. L., Brindle, M., & Morphy, P. (2008). The effects of self-regulated strategy development on the writing performance of second-grade students with behavioural and writing difficulties. J Spec Educ, 41 , 234-253.

Lane, K. L., Graham, S., Harris, K. R., Little, A., Sandmel, K., & Brindle, M. (2010). Story

writing: The effects of self-regulated strategy development for second-grade students with writing and behavioural difficulties. Journal of Special Education, 44 (2), 107-128.

Lienemann, T. O., Graham, S., Leader-Janssen, B., & Reid, R. (2006). Improving the writing  performance of struggling writers in second grade. Journal of Special Education, 40 (2), 66-78.

Lieneman, T. O., & Reid, R. (2008). Using self-regulated strategy development to improve expository writing with students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Exceptional Children , 74 (4), 471-486.

Little, M. A., Lane, K. L., Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (2010). Self-regulated strategies development for persuasive writing in tandem with schoolwide positive behavioural support: Effects for second-grade students with behavioural and writing difficulties. Behavioural Disorders, 35 , 157-179.

Milford, T. & Harrison, G. L. (2010). Using the PLEASE strategy with a middle school writer with a disability.  Intervention in School and Clinic, 45, 326-332.

Santangelo, T., Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (2007). Self-regulated strategy development: A validated model to support students who struggle with writing. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 5 (1), 1-20.

Saddler, B. (2006). Increasing story-writing ability through self-regulated strategy development: Effects on young writers with learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 29 (4), 291-305.

Saddler, B., Moran, S., Graham, S. & Harris, K. R. (2004). Preventing Writing Difficulties: The Effects of Planning Strategy Instruction on the Writing Performance of Struggling Writers, Exceptionality: A Special Education Journal, 12 (1), 3-17.

Sinclair, K. (2014). The effectiveness of an SRSD writing intervention for students with epilepsy.  (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5222 .

Zumbrunn, S., & Bruning R. (2013). Improving the writing and knowledge of emergent writers: The effects of self-regulated strategy development. Read Writ , 26(91), 91-110.

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Breanna Lawrence has a Masters degree in Counselling Psychology and is currently a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Victoria (UVic). She teaches undergraduate prerequisite courses for the counsellor education programs at the University of Victoria and works with children and youth in a community mental health setting. Breanna has worked at the local Learning Disabilities Association with children and at UVic as a learning specialist with university students. Breanna's doctoral research explores the comorbidity of learning difficulties and anxiety among adolescents.

Dr. Gina Harrison is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Victoria, and a Registered Psychologist. Dr. Harrison has been working with children and adults with learning disabilities for over 20 years. She served on the executive of the Saskatchewan Learning Disabilities Association, and has recently partnered with the South Vancouver Island chapter of the LDAC, with doctoral student Breanna Lawrence,  to implement a writing intervention for children with LD. Dr. Harrison’s research examines the cognitive and linguistic aspects of reading and writing disorders in children and adults, second language literacy acquisition, and effective academic intervention approaches.

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3 Evidence-Based Interventions to Help Students with Written Expression

Evidence-based interventions to help students with written expression.

Did you know that between 6.9% and 14.7% of students have specific writing disabilities, with and without reading problems?  In addition, students who do not have a specific writing disability also struggle.  A National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test indicated that 74% of eighth-grade students and 73% of 12th-grade students were writing at basic or below-basic levels.

Students may benefit from the following instructional approaches depending upon the student’s age and abilities.  Here are 3 evidence-based interventions to help students with written expression:

Transcription – when a student uses transcription, this can possibly help to eliminate any spelling or handwriting constraints.

Handwriting and Spelling Instruction – evaluate the effectiveness of the handwriting and spelling instruction to help improve written expression.  This is helpful for typically developing writers and struggling writers.

Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD) –  This is an instructional model to teach writing strategies to students. SRSD has been researched and shown to result in significant and meaningful improvements in writing knowledge, writing quality, writing approach, self-regulation skills, and motivation.  Read more on SRSD here .

More research is needed on multicomponent interventions (i.e. combining SRSD and transcription) to help students with written expression.

Reference:  Coker Jr, D. L., & Kim, Y. S. G. (2017). Critical Issues in the Understanding of Young Elementary School Students at Risk for Problems in Written Expression: Introduction to the Special Issue.  Journal of learning disabilities , 0022219417708168.

Do you work with students who struggle with written expression?  Check out these resources:

Assistive Technology, Implementation Methods & Educational Resource Recommendations for Kids with Written Output Disorders

Assistive Technology, Implementation Methods & Educational Resource Recommendations for Kids with Written Output Disorders   digital download is a resource guide for parents and professionals working with students with educationally significant handwriting challenges that make it difficult/impossible for them to complete written schoolwork with paper and pencil.

Special Edition for Kids with ASD - Assistive Technology, Implementation Methods & Educational Resource Recommendations for Kids with Written Output Disorders

Special Edition for Kids with ASD – Assistive Technology, Implementation Methods & Educational Resource Recommendations for Kids with Written Output Disorders   digital download  is an assistive technology resource guide for parents and professionals working with students with Autism Spectrum Disorder, over 50% of whom have educationally significant handwriting challenges that make it difficult/impossible for them to complete written schoolwork with paper and pencil.

Evidence-Based Interventions to Help Students with Written Expression

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Fine Motor Skills and Vocabulary Development

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  1. 5 Research-Based Writing Interventions for Your MTSS

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  2. How to Teach Paragraph Writing using a Research-Based Approach

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  6. Research-Based Writing Rubric by Teach Simple

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VIDEO

  1. Incorporating Research Based Strategies for ELLs

  2. Writing Systematic and Narrative Review

  3. What to avoid in writing the methodology section of your research

  4. NKCES Writing Workshop with Dr. Shawn Datchuk

  5. How to Improve Research Writing Skills

  6. Strategies For Successful Academic Writing & Publication

COMMENTS

  1. 6 Research-Based Interventions for Writing

    Below, we outline 6 Research-Based Writing Interventions for RTI/MTSS. We include various supports, ranging from free strategies to paid programs to address each school and student's wide variety of needs.

  2. PDF Evidence-Based Practices for Writing Instruction

    Evidence-Based Writing Practices: Essential Components The 36 evidence-based instruction and assessment practices for writing fall into one of the following 10 essential component categories. These component categories provide an organizational framework to aid teachers, administrators, and others in their application of the practices.

  3. The impact of three types of writing intervention on students' writing

    The classes were randomly assigned to four conditions: one comparison group and three writing types of writing interventions (i.e., week-journals, Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD) instruction and SRSD plus Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) program using a story-tool), with five classes participating in each condition.

  4. Evidence-based practices for writing instruction

    A major goal of education reform is to incorporate the findings from clear, consistent, and convincing scientific research into the day-to-day operations of schools to help create a culture of evidence-based practices to promote high-quality instruction and, as a result, improved student outcomes. From 20 meta-analyses or qualitative research syntheses, a list of 36 writing instruction and ...

  5. 5 Research-Based Writing Interventions for Your MTSS

    5 Research-Based Writing Interventions for Your MTSS All Popular Posts MTSS Behavior Despite its importance as a cornerstone of academic success, writing instruction often gets the short end of the stick in the classroom.

  6. Prevention and Intervention of Writing Difficulties for Students with

    This paper presents six principles designed to prevent writing difficulties as well as to build writing skills: (a) providing effective writing instruction, (b) tailoring instruction to meet the individual needs, (c) intervening early, (d) expecting that each child will learn to write, (e) identifying and addressing roadblocks to writing, and (f...

  7. WWC

    1 Explicitly teach appropriate writing strategies using a Model-Practice-Reflect instructional cycle. Show More 2 Integrate writing and reading to emphasize key writing features. Show More 3 Use assessments of student writing to inform instruction and feedback. Show More

  8. PDF Research-Based Writing Instruction

    Research-Based Writing Instruction Recent research reviews have gathered what we know about effective practices for teaching writing to adolescents. This fact sheet examines the research on writing instruction for youth and adults, with atten-tion to those who struggle to learn.

  9. Research-Based Writing Practices and the Common Core

    The current article presents research-supported practices that can be used to meet CCSS writing objectives in kindergarten to grade 8. We identified these practices by conducting a new meta-analysis of writing intervention studies, which included true and quasi-experiments, as well as single-subject design studies.

  10. Step Up to Writing Research-Based

    Research-Based Writing Instruction Compatible With Any Core Curriculum Grades K-12 Buy Now Home Products Writing Step Up to Writing Writing Instruction That Adapts to Every Student's Needs Step Up to Writing® is a comprehensive program of multisensory writing strategies that develop students' ability to create thoughtful, well-written compositions.

  11. Research and teaching writing

    One reason why this represents a positive step forward in education and the teaching of writing is that instructional practices based on high quality intervention research addresses the three issues of concern we raised about teaching lore. First, high quality intervention studies address the issue of validity.

  12. Single-Case Writing Interventions for Students with Disorders of ...

    Students with disorders of intellectual development (ID) often experience writing difficulties, and effective interventions are highly needed. This systematic review and meta-analysis of single-case experimental design (SCED) studies summarize the effects of writing interventions for students with disorders of ID aged 4-19 years. We conducted a systematic search of seven databases, ancestral ...

  13. PDF Writing Interventions for Students with Learning Disabilities: A

    Each study included in this review met the following criteria: (1) used an experimental, quasi-experimental, or single-subject design; (2) involved a writing intervention; (3) focused on participants who were K-12 students with LD; (4) reported at least one assessment of student writing outcomes at posttest; and (5) was published in English.

  14. PDF Adapted from Evidence-based practices for teaching writing

    These writing practices were deemed effective through research analysis of a wide variety of instructional practices as related to writing and the instruction of writing. What we know Evidence-based practices for teaching writing include: Teaching strategies for planning, revising, and editing Having students write summaries of texts

  15. Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers

    This protocol guided the review of research that informed the recommendations contained in the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) practice guide Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers, published in June 2012. This practice guide provides four recommendations for improving elementary students' writing.

  16. Elementary Grade Intervention Approaches to Treat Specific Learning

    The purpose of this article is to describe evidence-based reading and writing instruction and interventions that speech-language pathologists (SLPs), teachers, and interventionists can provide to struggling learners.

  17. Curriculum-Based Handwriting Programs: A Systematic Review With Effect

    The evidence shows that curriculum-based handwriting interventions resulted in small- to medium-sized improvements in legibility, a commonly reported challenge in this age group. The evidence for whether these interventions improved speed is mixed, and the evidence for whether they improved fluency is insufficient.

  18. TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 1: Research-Based Writing Instruction

    Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high school. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education. National Institute for Literacy. (2009). Learning to achieve: A review of the research literature on serving adults with learning disabilities. Washington, DC: Author.

  19. Research-Supported Assessment: Intervention Links for Reading and Writing

    This article discusses current research-supported instructional practices in reading and writing. It also reviews alternatives to ability-achievement discrepancy in identifying students for special education services, as well as introduces the idea that ability-achievement discrepancies should be based on specific cognitive factors that are relevant to specific kinds of learning disabilities ...

  20. Writing

    Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools - A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC Alliance for Excellent Education. Robinson, L. K., & Howell, K. W. (2008). Best practices in curriculum-based evaluation & written expression. In A. Thomas & J. Grimes (Eds.), Best ...

  21. New Research: 16 Writing Interventions That Work

    1. Comprehensive Writing Programs . Standard deviation: 0.47. These programs include those based on the process approach to writing, or what is sometimes called a writers' workshop.

  22. Writing Interventions for Children in Grades One to Six with Learning

    The most effective writing interventions, based on the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model (e.g., Santangelo, Harris, & Graham, 2007), target the multiple dimensions of the writing process via a particular strategy, usually represented by a mnemonic ( click here for more about mnemonics ), such as POW ( P ick my ideas; O rganize my ...

  23. Evidence-Based Interventions to Help Students with Written Expression

    Here are 3 evidence-based interventions to help students with written expression: Transcription - when a student uses transcription, this can possibly help to eliminate any spelling or handwriting constraints.

  24. Writing Interventions for Students with Specific Learning Disabilities

    asserted that writing skills are comprised of four domains: "(1) knowledge of. writing and writing topics, (2) skills for producing and crafting text, (3) processes. for energizing and motivating participants to write with enthusiasm, and (4) directing thoughts and actions through strategies to achieve writing goals".