Effects of Instructional Strategies on Children's Informational Writing.

AbstractThe purpose of this experiment was to test the effectiveness of four instructional strategies on students’ writing. Students were instructed in informational writing through one of the following: (a) presentation of model pieces of writing that focused on the product of good writing; (b) presentation of scales, questions, and criteria that focused on the process of writing by explicitly stating the criteria for good writing; (c) presentation of both model pieces of writing and scales, questions, and criteria-a combined approach involving both product and process strategies; and (d) free writing, a form of procedural facilitation (external supports) in which students were provided with pictures and asked to write about them. Informational writing was taught to 138 students in Grades 4, 6, and 8 in a school district in southern California. Writing samples were collected after treatment and again 2 weeks following the experiment. Results of nonorthogonal repeated measures analyses of variance indicat...