Do sixth-grade writers need process strategies?

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Writing Instruction Research
• Cognitive Science of Writing

Background:

• Strategy-focused writing instruction enhances writing performance by teaching goal setting and procedural strategies.
• Prior research indicates effectiveness of strategy-focused instruction for improving writing skills.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if teaching writing process strategies provides additional benefits beyond teaching product goals.
• To compare the impact of process-focused versus product-focused writing instruction.

Main Methods:

• Ninety-four sixth-grade students participated in a 10-hour instructional intervention.
• Intervention groups included: Product-and-Process training, Product-Only training, and a Control group.
• Writing performance was assessed using self-report, holistic, and text-analytic measures.

Main Results:

• Process instruction successfully altered students' writing processes, unlike other conditions.
• Both Product-and-Process and Product-Only groups showed significant text quality improvements compared to controls.
• No added benefit of process strategies was found over product goal instruction alone.

Conclusions:

• Strategy-focused writing instruction is valuable for improving writing outcomes.
• The specific training of process strategies may not offer additional advantages over product goal instruction.
• Process instruction significantly increased student time-on-task during writing activities.