Self-regulated strategy development instruction for writing an opinion essay: Effects for six students with emotional/behavior disorders

Abstract

A multiple-probe across-subjects design was used to examine persuasive writing performance of six 2 nd -through 5th-grade students with emotional/behavior disorders (EBD). Students' writing was evaluated before and after self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) instruction for the POW (Pick my idea, Organize my notes, Write and say more) + TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons -three or more, Ending, Examine) strategy. Students' essays written during and immediately after instruction indicated that the students had learned to write independently a persuasive essay with five parts. Generalization and maintenance performance, however, varied across students and appeared to be associated with behavior as opposed to the inability to transfer or remember the strategy.

Teaching argument writing to 7‐ to 14‐year‐olds: an international review of the evidence of successful practice

“… a writing process model in which students are encouraged to plan, draft, edit and revise their writing (Englert et al 1991;De La Paz and Graham 2002;Troia and Graham 2002)  self-motivation (in the form of personal target-setting -one aspect of self-regulated strategy development) (Graham et al 2005)  some degree of cognitive reasoning training in addition to the natural cognitive development that takes place with maturation (Englert et al 1991;Ferretti et al 2000), for example the selfregulated strategy development suggested by Mason and Shriner (2008)  peer collaboration, thus modelling a dialogue that (it is hoped) will become internal and constitute "thought" (Englert et al 1991)  explicit and very clear explanations for students of the processes to be learned, though there is a suggestion in Reznitskaya et al (2008) that these are less important than peer discussion.…”

“…Therefore the findings that we report here should be read with these caveats in mind. The foci of these three studies are: social and cognitive processes underlying the development of argumentational knowledge (Reznitskaya et al 2007); the effects of content and audience awareness goals for revision of persuasive essays (Midgette et al 2008); and self-regulated strategy development instruction for writing an opinion essay (Mason and Shriner 2008).…”

Improving quick writing performance of middle-school struggling learners

“…Raters were given anchor papers representing each score level. The use of holistic scoring, with anchor points, was developed and validated in previous research (Graham et al, 2005;Harris et al, 2006;Mason & Shriner, 2007). The anchor papers used for scoring in this study were developed and used in the prior SRSD for quick writing studies (Author).…”

Teaching Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders to Self-advocate through Persuasive Writing

“…This is not an uncommon finding. Previous SRSD studies have reported decreases in performance at maintenance (Mason & Shriner, 2008;Mastropieri et al, 2009Mastropieri et al, , 2010. It is uncertain why the mean number of words written at maintenance for the comparison group increased when compared to their mean performance at pre-and posttest.…”

“…How do the characters feel?) (Adkins, 2005;Lane et al, 2008;Lane et al, 2010) or persuasive writing using POWCTREE Mason & Shriner, 2008).…”