Strategic revisions in the writing of Year 7 students in the UK

This article discusses revisions to personal narrative writing made by Year 7 students (aged 11–12) in a UK secondary school. The concept of strategic revision was used as a basis for analysing drafts and revised texts in order to investigate strategies and techniques deployed by students in the process of revision and how these related to expectations student writers had of their readers.

These analyses suggest that, given a reasonably supportive instructional environment, some Year 7 students can revise their own written texts strategically, and that in doing so they may recruit, and perhaps acquire, a range of writing skills and associated procedural knowledge. They also suggest that in the process of revising their texts, some student writers may have altered their expectations of their readers' understanding, ability to interpret and willingness to empathise.

Implications for researching writing processes and for the writing curriculum are suggested, including the use of students' revisions to tap into the complex sets of procedural knowledge which seem to underlie aspects of writing and writing development.     

Spatial metaphors and writing hypertexts: Study within schools

This article deals with the writing of hypertext during regular school lessons. We suppose that hypertext-environments can be used as “cognitive tools” to promote the comprehension of semantic relationships within a subject and the reflection about knowledge structures. From research on learning by writing traditional text (Bereiter &; Scardamalia 1987), it can be expected that the constitutive features of “hypertext” must be comprehensible for leaner. In this study, we focus in particular on the question: Which metaphors are helpful to introduce the main idea of “hypertext” as a cognitive tool? In an explorative field study, we examined two parallel classes constructing hypertexts during their regular school lessons. The teachers in both classes used completely different metaphors to introduce the concept of hypertext. The metaphor chosen influenced both the structures of the completed hypertext-documents and the discussion about the subject matter. The space-metaphor seems to be especially appropriate to introduce the concept of hypertext to the learner in such a way that a creative interaction between the structure of the hypertext and the semantic structure of the subject could result. Three tests were administered to measure the degree to which knowledge about semantic relations and structures was acquired. The class that had discussed hypertext with spatial metaphors showed significantly better results than the parallel class.     

Writing as a learning tool: Testing the role of students’ writing strategies

The claim that writing facilitates students’ learning, although widely accepted, has little support from empirical research. A possible explanation for the lack of empirical evidence is that writing-to-learn research has disregarded that students use different writing strategies. The purpose of the present experimental study is to test whether it is effective to adapt writing-to-learn tasks to different writing strategies when teaching literature. A course “Learning to write argumentative texts about literature” was developed in two different versions: one adapted to a planning writing strategy, the other to a revising writing strategy. Participants were 113 tenth-grade high school students in the Netherlands. Our hypothesis is an adaptation hypothesis: we expect that the more a student will use a planning writing strategy, the more the student will profit from the lessons in the planning condition, and that the more a student uses a revising writing strategy, the more beneficial the revising condition will be. However, results show that for improving literary interpretation skill, a course adapted to the planning writing strategy is more effective for almost all students.     

Motivational factors and writing: the role of topic interestingness

The primary objective was to investigate the effect of an important motivational variable — interest ∶ on sixth-grade children’s performance on a writing task. Because our previous research showed that prior knowledge has an inordinate effect on writing, we augmented the children’s knowledge of the topics they were to write about. Students studied one of four texts (two high-interest/moderate-knowledge and two low-interest/high-knowledge) and then were assigned to either a tutorial condition, in which they studied and wrote about the same topic, or a control condition, in which they studied one topic and wrote about a companion topic at the same interest and knowledge level. Our general expectation, that children writing with tutorial support on high-interest topics would do better than all other groups because of the motivational effect, was not supported. The results unexpectedly showed that low-interest topics supported by tutorials resulted in longer productions. In addition high interest topics facilitated only better quality ideas, but not qualitatively better writing. These results indicate that the motivational power of generally interesting topics in writing is confounded with the role of prior knowledge. It is further suggested that attentional factors may explain why topic interest has a limited effect on children’s writing performance.     

Fostering topic knowledge: essential for academic writing

Several researchers emphasize the role of the writer’s topic knowledge for writing. In academic writing topic knowledge is often constructed by studying source texts. One possibility to support that essential phase of the writing process is to provide interactive learning questions which facilitate the construction of an adequate situation model by initiating macro-strategies. In order to examine whether the provision of interactive learning questions during studying source texts leads to better results in academic writing both writing process and performance of a group supported by interactive learning questions was compared to a study-only group which read the source texts without learning questions. Results revealed that students provided with interactive learning questions wrote longer essays and spend significantly more time prewriting and writing/revising their essays than did the students of the study-only group. Studying source texts with learning questions resulted in text products of better readability and partly better accuracy and coverage of content. These findings suggest that engaging students in answering learning questions when reading source texts can positively affect both writing process and performance.     

Digital writing practices: a close look at one grade three author

This paper reports on the digital writing practices of a Grade Three primary school student as he used an iPad to plan, produce and share digital texts. The case study acknowledges that writing is undergoing a period of great change in many classrooms and works to show how a student author has interpreted and produced digital texts with new technologies. In particular, the specific practices, digital materials and literacy concepts will be explicated through analyses of two digital texts created by this author. This focus acknowledges the ways texts can be planned, produced and shared using multiple modes and media. These social practices and the wider learning opportunities afforded through the flexible and recursive ways students produce text have yet to be fully explored. This paper also extends current understandings about digital writing practices through its examination of the connections between and among multiple apps as an author crafts digital text.     

The agencement of taskification: On new forms of reading and writing in BYOD schools

Abstract

The proliferation of digital devices in educational settings has contributed to the decentralization of knowledge from teachers and established textbooks to fluid online personalized resources, and from blackboards as spaces of materialization of this knowledge to personal screens. In this new constellation, school practices such as reading, writing and note-taking take new forms. How are these practices reconfigured when centered around mobile digital devices? In this paper, we investigate routine lesson practices of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school by means of an ethnographic observation. Adopting the term agencement as a heuristic device, we explore what practices are being constituted and how they are always in connection with one another. Moreover, we show that by practicing they produce different forms of action. We argue that in such a hybrid constellation, tasks find a different status beyond isolated and self-contained units for enhancing learning in different lessons. We introduce task-agencement, through which the task always entails a process of taskification that formats BYOD schools. With taskification, we mean that the task-agencement expands the domain in which tasks not only influence the organization and structure of lessons, but equally the very organization of the BYOD school by enacting a particular form of schooling. Finally, we propose a taskified form as a form of BYOD schooling that templates and formats how practices such as reading and writing, contextualization and introduction of the lesson are conducted.     

Cognitive constraints and the early learning goals in writing

This study examined the relative importance of a number of cognitive factors (i.e. working memory, vocabulary knowledge, general cognitive ability and reading skills) in accounting for differences in the rate of progress made by children in the development of emergent writing skills. Sixty-seven children were assessed on tasks measuring the visuospatial, phonological and central executive components of working memory. The children's written texts were analysed according to the assessment scale for writing from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile. The results indicate that reading performance and visuospatial memory skills are crucial to determining whether or not children aged 4–5 years are able to meet the UK government's prescribed educational standards for writing. The importance of visual skills in the acquisition of orthographic knowledge and writing conventions gained through reading is discussed in relation to current instructional strategies within schools.     

“I think it fits in”: using process drama to promote agentic writing with primary school children

Set against the backdrop of children being ‘alienated’ from their writing, this paper is taken from a United Kingdom Literacy Association sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here, we use discourse analysis to think about the children's historical creative writing in relation to the drama lessons which are differently framed by the teachers. Building upon a theoretical model of process drama as involving ‘embodied experience’ and writing as problem‐solving, a case is made that process drama can lead to what we term ‘agentic writing’. Agentic writing, we demonstrate, involves children actively translating their embodied experience of process drama into writing by making a range of intertextual borrowings. These borrowings serve both to capture and transform their embodied experience as the children gain agency by standing outside language to achieve ‘double voicedness’ and in doing so write sophisticated texts. Seeing the relationship between process drama and writing in this light, we argue, provides a means of reconnecting children to the act of writing.     

Materiality and ideology in children's perceptions of past historical writing

This article summarizes a small-scale investigation into 10- and 11-year-old children's perceptions of how the attitudes and values of different times in the past are reflected in historical writing for children. The research involved observation, reading and discussion of historical stories written at different times in the past about a particular period and character in the distant past, familiar to the children from their history lessons. The study investigated how children interacted with these texts in order to derive meaning from them. This article analyses the strategies children used and how they began to unpack the complex, multiple layers of meaning in ‘history stories’ by first examining the material properties of their texts. It considers how these material properties influenced the children's understanding of the texts' contents. It also seeks to discover whether young children are capable of comprehending the broader meanings of texts, beyond a literal reading of them, and how they explore texts critically in terms of their ideology. Findings suggest that able readers between the ages of 10 and 11 are indeed able to understand how ideologies are transmitted in such texts written for children, how these ideologies are conveyed to the child reader, and how they differ from the values and attitudes of the present.     

A reciprocal peer review system to support college students' writing

As students' problem‐solving processes in writing are rarely observed in face‐to‐face instruction, they have few opportunities to participate collaboratively in peer review to improve their texts. This study reports the design of a reciprocal peer review system for students to observe and learn from each other when writing. A sample of 95 undergraduate students was recruited to construct texts with the support of web‐based reciprocal peer review in the processes of modelling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection and exploration. The results of the study revealed that these six processes helped students externalise and visualise their internal writing processes so that they could observe and learn from peers in writing as well as support peers in making text revisions. During their extensive and reciprocal interactions with various peers, students addressed mutual concerns in each other's text revisions. They constructed collaborative language knowledge for text improvement as local revisions (grammatical corrections) and global revisions (corrections on the development, organization or style of a text) were made in their final texts. The students' perceptions towards text improvement in this web‐based peer review of modelling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection and exploration are also discussed in this study.     

‘He's gone and wrote over it’: the use of wikis for collaborative report writing in a primary school classroom

Wikis (websites that can be edited quickly by multiple authors) were used with upper-primary school children to write group reports on a science topic. Two teachers observed the children working, and their observations were used alongside the texts from the wikis and group interviews with children to explore the question of whether using wikis would lead to a change in writing practices and attitudes. This study found that although children often felt proprietorial about their texts, there was some evidence of negotiation and of joint content building. There was also evidence of peer-supported learning of information and communications technology (ICT) skills. Furthermore, the quality and quantity of writing were greater when using wikis than in conventional writing contexts, and the groups which engaged in more discussion produced more text.     

Reading-Writing Connections: the Importance of Interactive Discourse

Margaret Meek (1988) has described how children borrow ideas from literature through ‘unteachable’ lessons. In this article, I examine how children's written work is enhanced through ‘teachable’ lessons, where the teacher draws attention explicitly to aspects of literary texts and where children explore and evaluate literature through group reading and discussion. The ways in which children transfer the knowledge of literary devices, gained through group discussion, to their own writing are examined. The relationship between group evaluations of texts and children's writing development is explored with reference to the work of Year 6 children. This illustrates how critical reading and group discussion can raise primary children's metalinguistic awareness and develop their understanding of the stylistic features of narrative texts.     

Reading and writing to learn in secondary education: online processing activity and written products in summarizing and synthesizing tasks

The research reported here employed a multiple-case study methodology to assess the online cognitive and metacognitive activities of 15-year-old secondary students as they read informational texts and wrote a new text in order to learn, and the relation of these activities to the written products they were asked to generate. To investigate the influence of the task, students were required to perform two different tasks which differed in complexity and familiarity. The first task was reading a single text and making a written summary of it, while the second consisted in reading two texts and making a written synthesis of them. To gather information about how students construct meaning from informational texts, we asked students to think aloud as they read and wrote in order to provide us with information about their comprehension and composition processes. We also examined their reading and writing activities during the tasks. The results show that to a large extent secondary school students lack the cognitive and metacognitive processes that would enable them to make strategic use of reading and writing. They also show that, although there are no major differences in the way secondary school students tackle these different tasks, those who create the most elaborate products evidence a more recursive and flexible use of reading and writing. The most obvious conclusion as far as the repercussions of these findings are concerned is that there is an urgent need for work on tasks of this kind in the classroom.     

Teachers' talk on students' writing: Negotiating students' texts in interdisciplinary teacher teams

This paper examines how a team of teachers in a Norwegian upper secondary school responds to, negotiates, and evaluates students' writing in and across different disciplines. The purpose is to identify discourse strategies and professional development as the teachers discuss students' texts, and to explore how the teachers develop a shared understanding of how writing relates to students' learning. The findings show how the teachers' discourse reflects an emerging understanding of how writing is both a subject-specific and interdisciplinary skill conducive to learning, but also how institutional traditions and discipline-specific concerns together allow for and constrain teachers' learning.     

Text-belief consistency effect in adolescents´ comprehension of multiple documents from the Web (El efecto de consistencia en la comprensión lectora de los adolescentes de documentos múltiples provenientes de Internet)

ABSTRACT

Readers often comprehend belief-consistent information from multiple texts better compared with belief-inconsistent information (text-belief consistency effect). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether adolescents’ comprehension of multiple texts is similarly impacted by their beliefs. Moreover, readers’ prior knowledge and an alternating (compared with a blocked) mode of presenting multiple texts were expected to attenuate the text-belief consistency effect. High school students read two belief-consistent and two belief-inconsistent texts on one of two scientific issues in different modes of presentation (blocked vs. alternating). A recognition task was used to assess situation model strength for each text, and prior beliefs and prior knowledge were measured before the main experiment. As expected, in the blocked mode of presentation high school students had a stronger situation model for belief-consistent texts. In the alternating mode of presentation, participants had similar situation model strengths for the different texts. Moreover, high-knowledge participants experienced a text-belief consistency effect, whereas low-knowledge participants had weaker and similar situation models for the texts.     

The long-term effects of strategy-focussed writing instruction for grade six students

We compared 56 eighth-grade students who 28 months previously had received instruction in strategies for planning and revising their writing, with 21 students of similar academic ability from the same school who had not experienced the intervention. Both groups wrote an expository essay whilst logging their writing activities and completed writing metaknowledge and self-efficacy questionnaires. Students who had received the intervention showed a greater tendency to pre-plan (but not to revise) their texts, produced better quality and more reader-focused writing, and were more likely to show an awareness of the importance of text structure. These findings suggest persistent benefits for strategy-focused writing instruction.