Is Technology Used To Support Writing Instruction? (2)

By Author: Arsenalo
Total Articles: 116
Comment this article

Time and attention to writing instruction are not all that is necessary to improve the teaching of writing. What students are taught also matters?

For at least the last 25 years, the improvement of writing instruction has emphasized teaching students the skills and strategies needed to write effectively in a variety of contexts and disciplines. Such instruction Tag Heuer Replica has typically been called process-oriented and has tended to emphasize extensive prewriting activities, multiple drafts, sharing of work with partners or small groups, and careful attention to writing conventions before sharing with others.

By 1992, process-oriented instruction had be-come the conventional wisdom, with over 71% of students at Grade 8 in classrooms where the teacher reported that it was a central part of instruction, and another 26% in classrooms using it as a supplemental part; results in 1998 were essentially identical. (Comparable data are not available for Grade 12 or for later years.) By 1998, the reported emphasis on process instruction ...
... was consistent across subgroups of students defined by race/ethnicity and by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch.

Although later assessments did not ask teachers about their emphasis on process-oriented instruction, they do include reports from students on how they approached school writing tasks. Overall patterns are quite similar at Grades 8 and 12 in 2007, with more than 60% reporting that they almost always make changes to fix mistakes, and 30% to 40% reporting almost always writing more than one draft. Strategies requiring interaction with others were somewhat less frequent at both grades (brainstorming, 15%; working with others in pairs or small groups, 25% to 28%).

In spite of the overall similarity between Grades 8 and 12, the two groups moved in opposite directions between 2002 and 2007. Eighth-grade students showed small but significant reductions in each of these strategies, reducing their use from 1 to 3 percentage points. The twelfth-grade students reported small increases, again ranging from 1 to 3 percentage points. (The increases were statistically significant for making changes to fix mistakes and for organizing before beginning to write, and trend toward significance for brainstorming with others.) Again, the grade-level differences over time may be related to the greater demands of high-stakes testing facing eighth-grade students, leading to a focus on the production of first and final drafts with less scope for an elaborated writing process.

The changes at Grade 8 in students' reports between 2002 and 2007 are paralleled by changes in the responses from their teachers. The teacher reports showed similar small but significant reductions in asking students to write more than one draft, to plan before they write, and to check proper spelling and grammar.

What students say they do and what they actually do are not always the same? On some of the writing assessments, students were encouraged to use an extra blank page for planning before they began to write, and these pages were scored for the number of different activities students demonstrated. Over time, the use of this prewriting space for NAEP tasks has changed dramatically (see fig. 7). In 1984, a few of the assignments in the assessment left a blank page for the Tag Heuer Replica Watches students to make notes or outlines, but fewer than 20% of Grade 8 or Grade 11 students made use of the space. Since 1992, every task has provided room for prewriting. (From 1998 on, students were also given a separate brochure that emphasized the importance of selected planning and revising strategies.) In these later assessments, many more students made at least some use of the space provided. Even with the differences in test administration, students' tendency to do some overt planning before they begin to write seems to have increased across this 23-year time span.
Are Teachers Engaging in Appropriate Professional Development?