Effects of teaching planning strategies to first‐grade writers

Abstract

Background. Traditionally writing instruction at the start of school has focused on developing students' ability to spell and handwrite. Teaching children explicit self-regulatory strategies for developing content and structure for their text has proved effective for students in later grades of primary (elementary) education.Aims. The present study aims to determine whether first-grade students benefit from learning higher-level self-regulating strategies for explicit planning of content and structure.Sample. Five mixed-ability Spanish first-grade classes were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition that received strategy-focused instruction (3 classes, N=62), or to a practice-matched control condition (2 classes, N=39).Method. Over 10, 50 minutes sessions, the intervention taught strategies for writing stories.Writing performance was assessed prior to intervention, immediately after intervention and 7 weeks post-intervention, in terms of both text features associated with written narratives and by holistic quality ratings.Results. Students who received the intervention subsequently produced texts with better structure, coherence and quality, and a larger number of features associated with narrative texts.These effects remained at follow-up and were not present in the control condition. Conclusion.Our findings indicate that teaching explicit strategies for planning text content and structure benefits young writers even when spelling and handwriting skills are not yet well established.

Child‐level factors affecting rate of learning to write in first grade

“…All students in our sample took part in a programme of researcher‐designed written composition instruction that aimed to teach both transcription and ideation, based on methods previously evaluated as successful, and described in detail in Arrimada, Torrance, and Fidalgo (2018a, 2018b). This provided some standardization of instruction against which to interpret students’ learning.…”

Response to Intervention in first-grade writing instruction: a large-scale feasibility study

“…Text-planning instruction (41 sessions) focused on how to construct narratives and drew heavily on previous strategy-focused interventions (Arrimada et al, 2019;Harris et al, 2015). Narrative structure was taught in 3 stages: Direct instruction of the strategy for generating and structuring content; modelling of the writing process using the strategy; and individual practice.…”

“…Additionally, learning self-regulatory strategies for planning and structuring content may reduce the tendency for cognitive overload (Kellogg, 1990) and reliance on external prompts. There is some evidence that teaching planning strategies in first grade benefits compositional quality (Arrimada et al, 2019;Zumbrunn & Bruning, 2013). These studies rely on strategy-focused instruction, an instructional approach aimed at teaching self-regulating planning and/or revising strategies so that students eventually use them independently (Greenfield et al, 2010;Rinaldi et al, 2011;Stuart et al, 2011) and believe it has a positive impact on their teaching practices, autonomy and self-efficacy (Greenfield et al, 2010;Stuart et al, 2011).…”

Factors affecting learning to write in first grade

“…Students received three 15 minute sessions per week in which they completed exercises in one of spelling, handwriting, sentence-combining, and narrative planning skills. Narrative planning was taught following strategy-focussed methods previously found successful in developing students' composition ability in a similar context (Arrimada et al, 2019). Students were taught an age-appropriate mnemonic (the Montaña de los Cuentos / Story Mountain) for typical narrative structure, with different elements (e.g., Introduction; When?…”