The Effects of Computerized Sentence and Paragraph Strategy Instruction for Struggling Adolescent Writers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether struggling adolescent writers could learn sentence and paragraph writing skills from a software program. Nine junior-high and nine senior-high struggling writers participated in a multiple-probe across-students design that was replicated six times. Instructional procedures within the software program were based on methods previously found to be successful in teaching learning strategies to adolescents. Measures included scores on practice activities, time spent working through the program, quiz and knowledge test scores, a sentence-construction score, a complete sentences score, a paragraph-organization score, a planning score, satisfaction with the software program, and satisfaction with personal writing skills. All of the students met mastery on all of the activities and quizzes in the program. Significant differences representing large effect sizes (range of Cohen’s d = 1.42 to 2.39) were found between baseline and post-instruction scores in the multiple-probe design on the Complete Sentence and Paragraph-Organization measures. Students indicated that they were satisfied with the software program and their own writing.