Effects of teaching planning strategies to first-grade writers

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.

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.

Five mixed-ability Spanish first-grade classes were randomly assigned either to an experimental condition that received strategy-focused instruction (three classes, N = 62), or to a practice-matched control condition (two classes, N = 39).

Over 10, 50-min 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.

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.

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.