Conspicuous Strategies in Teaching Expressive Writing: A Quantitative Study Comparing Two Approaches to Process Writing

Abstract

A process-writing approach (BW) with novel concepts was developed by the authors to teach writing to elementary-level students. They believed the BW approach was effective but was particularly effective for special-needs students. Consequently, they decided to quantitatively test these assertions. Instead of testing students taught using the BW approach against a control with no special training, the authors chose to compare BW to a control trained using a widely-taught process-writing approach (PW). Rather than test null hypotheses that assert that BW and PW are equally effective for all students and that BW and PW were equally effective with special-needs students and general education students, the authors decided to test two alternative hypotheses: 1) The BW intervention is significantly better than the PW intervention for all students. 2) Special needs students show significantly more improvement than general-education students for both interventions but special-needs students trained with BW show more improvement than those trained with PW. The standardized Written Expression subtest of the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test II (WIAT-II), Form A, was used to quantify achievement. The WIAT was developed by Dr. David Wechsler and has been widely used to quantify academic achievement of people in many areas including written expression. The BW and PW groups were tested using the WIAT before and after being trained to write for four months using the BW and PW approaches. Student growth was analyzed for general-education and special-needs students for each intervention. Highly significant results confirmed the hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of the BW approach. The educational challenge to bring all children to higher levels of competence in their academies is daunting. In 2001 the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed (www.nclb.gov) calling on educators to use research-validated strategies in order to effectively teach an ever-increasing diverse population of students. Elementary and middle schools across the nation are engaged in the pursuit of finding the best ways to teach the foundation skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a faster pace than ever before. Educators continue to deliberate which teaching strategies will improve student academic skills levels across the curriculum. School districts across the nation are seeking innovative research-based teaching strategies to improve student performance.