Improving writing skills of students in the upper elementary grades: an experimental intervention study

It has been established that, in the Netherlands, a majority of students does not attain the desired level of writing skills at the end of elementary school, and that the way writing is taught must be improved. To identify effective interventions to improve students’ writing performance, we conducted a meta-analysis of 32 (quasi-) experimental writing intervention studies, specifically targeted at students grade 4 to 6. Our analysis identified five instructional practices that significantly improved students’ writing performance: goal setting, strategy instruction, text structure instruction, peer interaction, and feedback. Based on the results of this meta-analysis, we developed a program for the teaching of writing in grade 4 to 6, of which we tested the effectivity in a large-scale intervention study, involving 1186 students, using a cross lagged panel design with two conditions. Multilevel analyses revealed that in both conditions the quality of students’ writing improved significantly after the program. Averaged over the two conditions, the writing proficiency of students improved by almost half a grade. Moreover, we found that two months after the intervention, the increased level of students’ writing scores was retained for students in the first condition. These findings indicate that evidence-based practices combined into one program for teaching writing are effective in improving the writing performance of upper elementary students.