Improving the writing performance of struggling writers in second grade.

An important goal in preventing writing disabilities is to provide effective early instruction to at-risk students to maximize their writing development. This study examined whether or not explicitly teaching six at-risk second-grade writers, including children with disabilities, how to plan and draft stories would improve their story writing as well as their recall of narrative reading material. The self-regulated strategy development model was used to teach these strategies; the impact of this instruction was evaluated via a multiple-baseline design. Instruction had a positive impact on students' writing, as their stories were longer, more complete, and, with the exception of one student, qualitatively better. Instructional effects also transferred to the recall of narrative reading material for four of the six students. These findings were generally maintained over time.

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Writing is a difficult and demanding task. It is a conscious and self-directed activity, involving the intelligent use of a variety of mental operations and skills to satisfy the writer's goals and meet the needs of the reader (Graham, in press b). As a result, a writer must deal with many demands at once. As Hayes and Flower (1980) noted, skilled writers caught in the act look very much like busy switchboard operators as they try to juggle a number of demands on their attention simultaneously (e.g., making plans, drawing ideas from memory, developing concepts, or creating an image of the reader). In fact, skilled writing does "not simply unfold automatically and effortlessly in the manner of a well learned motor skill ... writing anything but the most routine and brief pieces is the mental equivalent of digging ditches" (Kellogg, 1993, p. 17). It involves a high degree of self-regulation, cognitive effort, and attentional control (Graham & Harris, 2003).

Writing is a difficult and demanding task that many children find difficult to master. This observation is supported by data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). Three out of every four 4th-, 8th-, and 12th-grade students achieve only partial mastery of the writing skills and knowledge they need at their respective grade levels. Only 1 in 100 students attains "advanced" writing skills. Difficulties mastering the writing process are even more prevalent for students with special needs or disabilities (e.g., Graham, Harris, & Larsen, 2001; Harris & Graham, 1999; Resta & Eliot, 1994). These students' papers contain fewer ideas, are more poorly organized, and are of lower quality compared with compositions produced by their typically achieving peers (Graham & Harris, 2002).

Children's difficulties with learning to write led the National Commission on Writing (NCW; 2003) to recommend that writing become a central focus of school reform efforts, as students' educational and occupational success will be impeded if they do not learn to write well. The NCW's efforts have convinced both the general public and policymakers of the importance of writing (see also NCW, 2004, 2005), as well as the need to take action now. The success of reform efforts in writing, however, depends in large part on the application of instructional practices that are effective in enhancing writing development. The identification of effective instructional practices for young beginning writers, particularly students at risk for writing difficulties and students with special needs, is especially critical. Addressing these children's writing problems early in the educational process is advantageous for two reasons (Graham, Harris, & Mason, 2005). First, waiting until later grades to address literacy problems that originated in the primary grades has not been very successful (Slavin, Karweit, & Madden, 1989). Second, early intervention should help to maximize the writing development of young at-risk writers, minimizing the number of students who develop long-term difficulties with writing.

One approach to early writing intervention with at-risk students and children with special needs is to provide additional or specialized instruction in basic text transcription skills, such as handwriting and spelling. These efforts have resulted in improvements in the writing output, writing quality, and sentence construction skills of these children (Berninger et al., 1997; Berninger et al., 1998; Graham, Harris, & Fink, 2000; Graham, Harris, & Fink-Chorzempa, 2002; Jones & Christensen, 1999). A second approach is captured by the work of Englert and her colleagues (1995). They examined the effectiveness of a curricular approach that tied writing and reading instruction together, made writing and reading strategies visible, involved teacher-student discussion about these strategies, provided procedural facilitators (such as a semantic map) around which this dialogue occurred, and encouraged students to share their knowledge with others. This program had a positive impact on both the reading and writing performance of primary-grade students with mild disabilities. Berninger and her colleagues (Berninger, Abbott, Whitaker, Sylvester, & Nolen, 1995) illustrate a third approach to early intervention. They taught handwriting and spelling to third-grade struggling writers individually and also modeled the composing processes of planning, writing, reviewing, and revising. This had a positive impact on these young students' writing skills.

Another approach to early writing intervention with young struggling writers is illustrated in the work of Graham and Harris (see Graham & Harris, 2005a). Although their primary instructional focus was on teaching children strategies for carrying out specific composing processes (e.g., planning), they also taught them how to apply the target strategies, better understand the writing task, and regulate their behavior during writing. Their instruction was further designed to enhance specific aspects of motivation, such as self-efficacy and effort. This approach is consistent with theories on how competence and expertise develop in subject-matter domains (see Alexander, 1992; Pintrich & Schunk, 1996). These conceptualizations emphasize that learning depends, in large part, on changes that occur in strategic knowledge, domain-specific knowledge, and motivation.