Abstract
SRSD interventions on writing have shown to be effective across a myriad of contexts and populations. Less is known, however, about their effectiveness for improving the writing skills of disadvantaged children, relative to their efficacy with other types of students. This is important, because low-SES children have been found to often display poor levels of written composition, which is key to preventing school failure. This study thus aimed to test the efficacy of an SRSD program for opinion essay writing in low- and mid-high SES classrooms. Participants were 645 children, attending 2nd and 4th grade classrooms, who were quasi-randomly assigned to the experimental (SRSD) or to the control condition. Children were assessed at pre- and post-test, where measures of text productivity, structural elements, and text quality were obtained. In addition, children’s text spelling accuracy and reading comprehension skills were evaluated to test for developmental cascading effects. Children in the SRSD condition outscored the control group in all outcomes, regardless of their SES background. Moreover, some children in the SRSD group improved reading comprehension, but this added benefit was only observed in the mid-high-SES children. No group made gains on spelling accuracy at posttest. We discuss the theoretical and educational implications of our findings.
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Notes
For ethical reasons, the same training was offered to all control schools after the intervention had concluded.
A “didactic sequence” for writing instruction typically consists of a series of tasks that are oriented towards a real-life goal, which is thought to help children understand the function of different text genres and to better take into account readers’ needs. It may also provide procedural strategies.
Catalan is a Romance language, morphosyntactically similar to Spanish, with which it coexists. Virtually all speakers of Catalan are, to a large degree, also speakers of Spanish. Catalan orthography is, however, more complex than Spanish, and has been argued to be much less consistent in its phono-graphemic mappings (Salas, 2020).
The actual label is “centres d’alta complexitat” [‘high-complexity centers’].
All estimates are unstandardized.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Grants 2015ACUP 00175 to Naymé Salas and Grant EDU2015-64798-R to Teresa Ribas. We are indebted to Dr. Teresa Limpo, who hosted the first author during a short scientific stay, funded by COST Action IS1401 (PI: Rui Alves), and provided useful methodological advice. We would like to thank all the children and teachers who participated in the study. We are also grateful to Gabriel Liberman and Hugo Vilar Weber for their guidance in the statistical approach, and to Liliana Tolchinsky for her invaluable insights. Finally, we thank Carlos Villuendas for developing a bespoke app for text evaluation.
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Salas, N., Birello, M. & Ribas, T. Effectiveness of an SRSD writing intervention for low- and high-SES children. Read Writ 34, 1653–1680 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10103-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10103-8