Diversity of Advanced Sentence Structures (DASS) in writing predicts argumentative writing quality and receptive academic language skills of fifth-to-eighth grade students

Abstract

Prior adolescent writing research typically used omnibus length-based measures, such as Mean Length of Clauses (MLC), to describe and evaluate students’ performance at constructing complex sentences. This study undertook to: (1) develop a novel approach, Diversity of Advanced Sentence Structures (DASS), with a more detailed inventory of students’ complex sentence structures; and (2) provide evidence of DASS’ validity. To develop DASS, seven types of sentence structures (adverbial clause, clausal complement, clausal prepositional complement, relative clause as modifier, clausal subject, noun as modifier, and passive voice) that characterize school-based texts in adolescence, were identified. Students’ essays were coded for the presence or absence of each structure; the total types of structures present in an essay determined the 0-to-7-point DASS score. A cross-sectional sample of fifth-to-eighth graders (N = 512) wrote argumentative essays responding to a school policy controversy. DASS scores in seventh or eighth grade were significantly higher than those in fifth grade. DASS significantly and positively predicted both students’ writing quality and their receptive academic language, while MLC did not show significant associations with either, controlling for students’ grade, gender, socio-economic status. This study suggests that the DASS offers a promising novel approach to capturing a detailed picture of how emerging academic writers construct complex sentences.