What is the impact of peer-assisted sentence-combining teaching on primary pupils' writing performance?
This digest found in
English
How was the research carried out?
The researchers investigated whether teaching aimed at improving children's sentence - constructing skills would benefit 9 -11 year olds of all abilities.
They focused on sentence construction skills for two reasons:
- teachers' assessment of academic performance is often based on the quality of pupils' writing, therefore evaluations are influenced by sentence structure; and
- the researchers believed that early mastery of sentence construction could free up children's mental capacity for other aspects of writing, such as creative writing.
Eleven year-olds from nine classrooms in three schools were screened using a written language test to identify their ability levels. Forty-four pupils were identified through this process and then divided into more and less skilled categories. Results were confirmed with teachers. The pupils were then randomly assigned to two groups: sentence combining or grammar instruction, so there was an equal number of more and less skilled writers in each group. Baseline tests showed that there were no significant differences in reading and oral language skills between pupils in the two groups or between pupil ability levels.
In the intervention phase in each of the groups, each pupil pair, was taught individually by student teachers for 30 lessons - three a week for ten weeks, each lesson lasting 25 minutes. All the student teachers had been trained to teach using both methods and taught an equivalent number of pairs in each group. They followed pre-planned scripts containing a check list to ensure one method wasn't favoured over the other.
