Exploring the short-term and maintained effects of strategic instruction on the writing of 4th grade students: should st
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Exploring the short‑term and maintained effects of strategic instruction on the writing of 4th grade students: should strategies be focused on the process? Lucía Rodríguez‑Málaga1,2 · Celestino Rodríguez1 · Raquel Fidalgo2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The principal aim of strategy-focused instruction is to teach students strategies to control their writing processes and achieve quality writing. For this purpose, nine 4th grade Elementary School classes from three different schools (N = 215) were randomly allocated to two forms of strategy-focused program called cognitive selfregulation instruction (CSRI). The full-CSRI (experimental condition 1, n = 72) taught students a strategic approach to set appropriate product goals along with planning strategies. However, in the brief-CSRI (experimental condition 2, n = 69), the direct teaching of planning procedures was removed. These two experimental conditions were compared with a control condition (n = 74). We used a pre-test/posttest design and we also collected a maintenance writing performance 7 months after the intervention. Writing performance was holistically evaluated through readerbased measures made up of aspects related to structure, coherence, and quality. Only the full-CSRI condition wrote better compare–contrast texts than the control group in both the short term and at the maintenance timepoint. The study discusses the effects of the intervention on each measure and whether or not it is necessary to train process strategies. Keywords Writing instruction · Strategy-focused instruction · Elementary education
Introduction Writing is an essential skill to communicate, both in daily life and in professional or academic contexts (Graham & Harris, 2013). For this reason, the acquisition of writing skills is one of the main aims of education (Psyridou, Tolvanen, Lerkkanen, * Celestino Rodríguez [email protected] 1
Faculty of Psychology, University of Oviedo, Plaza Feijoo s/n, 33003 Oviedo, Asturias, Spain
2
Faculty of Education, University of León, León, Spain
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Poikkeus, & Torppa, 2020). However, writing is a complex task in which the person has to deal with many different processes: planning (prepare the content activating previous knowledge and organizing the main ideas); transcription (grammatical encoding of the ideas retrieving syntactic and semantic knowledge) and, reviewing (Hayes, 2012; Kellogg, 2018). Given the complexity of writing, it is not surprising that this skill is a demanding process for novice or young writers, especially when the transcription process (e.g., orthography, sentence construction) is not automatic (e.g., Limpo & Alves, 2013; Olive & Kellogg, 2002). If the transcription process is not automatic, students focus most of their cognitive resources on text production, and few resources are available for fundamental processes such as planning or reviewing (Rijlaarsdam et al., 2011). Even in older students (upper-primary and undergraduate students) rese
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