The 6-year-olds sit expectantly in front of their teacher. After reading a story to them, the teacher discusses how the author used specific words to describe the main character. She then asks the children to write their own story that uses the same kind of words to describe a character.
This is just one example of an approach teachers might use to help first graders learn to write. The question is, does it work?
David Coker, Charles (Skip) MacArthur and Liz Farley-Ripple in UD’s School of Education are working to find the answer. They are leading a $1.4 million, four-year study funded by the Institute of Education Sciences to determine the best methods to teach writing skills to first graders.
Writing is central to the development and refinement of ideas, and it is crucial for both academic and professional success, according to a report from the National Commission on Writing. However, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that over 70 percent of fourth-grade students tested did not meet the benchmark for proficient writing. Even more alarming, the results revealed a large achievement gap attributed to family income.
Given the lackluster writing performance of American students, teachers and researchers want to learn about more effective teaching practices.
Much of our understanding of how writing instruction is conducted in the primary grades comes from teacher surveys. Teachers report spending more time teaching lower-level skills than composing, and indicate that they conference with struggling writers more than with average writers. Most writing instruction is given to the whole class, with small-group instruction and individual support provided when needed. While these surveys provide insight into the nature of writing instruction, they are unable to capture how variations in instructional methods and time devoted to instruction translate to student outcomes.
Through a partnership with the Christina and Red Clay school districts in Delaware, UD investigators have developed a protocol that will be used in 50 first-grade classrooms to observe and monitor the results of various teaching methods. Analyses will be centered on 6–9 students per classroom, segmented by low, medium and high performers. The Delaware Education Research and Development Center at UD is helping to train the observers who are responsible for the day-long classroom monitoring.
The team hopes to provide a detailed picture of what effective writing instruction looks like in first grade and which approaches are more effective for students with specific strengths or weaknesses. “Our long-term goals are to use this information to design a writing curriculum that allows teachers to differentiate instruction based on students’ needs,” Coker says.