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Improving Fourth-Grade Students’ Composition Skills: Effects of Strategy
Instruction and Self-Regulation Procedures
Cornelia Glaser and Joachim C. Brunstein
University of Giessen
Extending S. Graham and K. R. Harris’s (2003) self-regulated strategy development model, this study
examined whether self-regulation procedures would increase the effectiveness of a writing strategies
training designed to improve 4th graders’ (N⫽113) composition skills. Students who were taught
composition strategies in conjunction with self-regulation procedures were compared with (a) students
who were taught the same strategies but received no instruction in self-regulation and (b) students who
received didactic lessons in composition. Both at posttest and at maintenance (5 weeks after the
instruction), strategy plus self-regulation students wrote more complete and qualitatively better stories
than students in the 2 comparison conditions. They also displayed superior performance at a transfer task
requiring students to recall essential parts of an orally presented story.
Keywords: text composition, writing achievement, strategy instruction, self-regulated learning, self-
regulated strategy development model
Drawing on Graham and Harris’s (2003) work on teaching
cognitive and self-regulatory writing strategies to young and un-
skilled writers, in this study we sought to examine the potential
benefits of integrating self-regulation procedures into writing strat-
egies training designed to improve elementary school children’s
composition skills. Our aim was to demonstrate that self-regulation
activities are effective in the sense that they augment performance
effects of strategy instruction, ensure strategy maintenance, and
facilitate transfer of the learned strategies to untrained tasks. To
test these ideas, we taught fourth graders writing strategies in
combination with self-regulation procedures and contrasted this
treatment with two comparison conditions (teaching strategies
alone and didactic lessons in composing) in a pretest, posttest,
follow-up test design.
Theoretical and Empirical Background
Several prominent researchers (e.g., Graham & Harris, 2000;
Kellogg, 1996; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1986; Zimmerman &
Risemberg, 1997) have described skilled writing as a cognitively
demanding task that requires young writers to master a variety of
skills in a lengthy and often burdensome process of self-reflective
learning. Hayes and Flower (1980; Hayes, 1996; see also
Berninger & Swanson, 1994) outlined an expert model of writing
that had a considerable impact on educational research with de-
veloping writers. According to this model, writing involves three
kinds of mental activities: planning, translating, and reviewing.
The heart of the model is a “monitor,” or metacognitive authority,
that serves to control the execution of these activities so that they
operate in a synergistic manner until the writing product fits the
writer’s intentions.
As Hayes and Flower (1980) stated, planning includes three
components: generating ideas for what to write and how to write it,
organizing selected ideas to create a cohesive plan, and setting
goals that are stored for further consultation throughout the com-
position process. Translating contains two kinds of transforma-
tions: transforming an idea into a sentence (text generation) and
transforming the generated sentence into written symbols (tran-
scription). Reviewing involves both evaluating the existing text in
light of a writer’s intentions and modifying the text on different
language levels. Reviewing requires a high degree of coordination
among various subprocesses, such as reading, editing (e.g., cor-
rection of surface errors), and rewriting (e.g., addition of meaning-
changing information) parts of a story.
To manage these multiple processes of composing, the monitor
acts as a metacognitive control center that ensures that a writer can
flexibly switch his or her attention between different tasks when
composing. Unfortunately, developing writers, and especially chil-
dren with learning difficulties, show only little metacognitive
activity when composing. Indeed, a considerable body of evidence
(see Fitzgerald, 1987; Graham & Harris, 2003; McCutchen, 1995;
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1986) suggests that novice (or unskilled)
writers (a) lack knowledge about genre-specific discourse sche-
mata and associated strategies for composition; (b) show almost no
evidence of planning and revising activities; and (c) often fail to
monitor the whole writing endeavor, although they tend to over-
estimate their writing capabilities.
Instructional approaches that seek to remedy the aforementioned
deficiencies and improve novice writers’ composition skills gen-
erally comply with principles spelled out by theorists of self-
regulated learning (e.g., Zimmerman, 1998) and good information
processing (e.g., Pressley, Borkowski, & Schneider, 1989): First,
to help young writers mindfully plan, compose, and revise their
Cornelia Glaser and Joachim C. Brunstein, Department of Psychology,
University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Cornelia
Glaser, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-Universita¨t Giessen,
Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10F, D-35394, Giessen, Germany. E-mail:
cornelia.glaser@psychol.uni-giessen.de
Journal of Educational Psychology Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association
2007, Vol. 99, No. 2, 297–310 0022-0663/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.297
297
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