Writing Intervention Research: A Meta-analysis of Teaching Children to Write

Abstract

It has been determined that most students in the Netherlands, much like students in other countries, do not have the required level of writing proficiency by the time they finish primary school. This is the case even though the Netherlands has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Not much time is set out for writing, and very few schools can do this. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the teaching of writing in primary schools has to be improved. In order to discover effective ways of teaching writing, we carried out a meta-analysis of studies that involved kids in grades 4 to 6 attending conventional schools and participating in writing intervention programs. The average impact sizes of the ten different types of interventions have been determined: instruction on strategy, instruction on text structure, instruction on prewriting exercises, instruction on peer support, instruction on grammar, feedback, evaluation, process approach, goal setting, and revision. There was a statistically significant difference between the first and second place finishers in five categories. When each intervention was evaluated on its own, it was found that setting goals (ES = 2.03), teaching strategies (ES =.96), teaching text structure (ES =.76), receiving support from peers (ES =.59), and receiving feedback (ES =.88) were the most effective ways to improve students' writing performance. More research is necessary to understand better how these interventions could be implemented in classrooms to improve the writing skills of primary school children.