Using Performance Feedback and Goal Setting to Improve Elementary Students' Writing Fluency: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

.Although performance feedback interventions successfully lead to improvements in students' performance, research suggests that the combination of feedback and goal setting leads to greater performance than either component alone and that graphing performance in relation to a goal can lead to improvements in academic performance. The goal of the study was to examine the writing fluency growth of 115 third-grade students participating in a performance feedback intervention combined with a salient goal-setting component (n = 38) in comparison to a performance feedback (n = 39) or control (n = 38) condition, using a randomized controlled trial. As hypothesized, students in the two performance feedback conditions significantly improved their writing fluency over the course of the study, averaging a weekly gain of approximately 1.88 to 2.11 correct writing sequences, in contrast to students participating in the control condition, who averaged a weekly gain of less than one correct writing sequence. However, contrary to one of the major hypotheses, providing students with an additional goal-setting component did not improve students' writing fluency more than performance feedback alone. Considerations regarding the use of performance feedback interventions, as well as limitations of the study, are discussed.