Project Activities
The goals of this project are to develop, design, field test, and provide feasibility data regarding a kindergarten writing intervention. The study will involve five phases: development, exploratory implementation, refined implementation, a pilot test of feasibility, and wrap-up and final modifications. The implementation phases and pilot study will involve 90 to 135 kindergarten students each, and modifications to the intervention will be made between each implementation based on the data collected. Each implementation phase and the pilot study will include a group of comparison classrooms, and students' progress in writing will be compared between the intervention and comparison classrooms. Data used for the refinement of the intervention will include teacher focus groups and interviews, assessment of videotaped lessons, and student writing outcomes.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This study will be conducted in urban and suburban school districts in Pennsylvania.
Sample
Participants will include approximately 360 kindergarten students.
Intervention
The intervention will incorporate five principles of instructional design: (1) explicit instruction with extensive modeling by the teacher; (2) multiple opportunities for children to practice; (3) integration of reading and writing through unifying themes; (4) brief, developmentally-appropriate activities to boost engagement; and (5) use of peer assisted learning strategies. Lessons will be designed to last approximately 30 minutes, and will occur three days each week over 16 weeks. Weekly lessons will include letter writing automaticity instruction, spelling lessons, and instruction regarding composition of sentences and paragraphs. Students will work in pairs to practice writing. High achieving and low achieving students will be paired together, with the higher-achieving student first serving as a Coach and the lower-performing student first serving as Writer. Children in each pair will take turns being Coach and Writer, and pairs will be reassigned every 4–6 weeks.
Research design and methods
This project involves an iterative developmental design including the development of lessons, two phases of implementation, a feasibility pilot study, and final revisions. During the two implementation phases, students receiving the intervention will be compared to students in regular classrooms on improvement in writing skills, based on a pre-test. Interviews and focus groups with teachers will help the researchers to determine revisions to be made to the intervention. The feasibility pilot phase will also use pre- and post-intervention assessments of students' writing in treatment and comparison classrooms, and focus groups with teachers will provide information regarding feasibility. Classroom observation and videotaping will be used to assess fidelity of implementation.
Control condition
In both implementation phases and the pilot study, 45 students in business-as-usual classrooms will serve as the comparison group.
Key measures
To assess students' writing at pre- and post-intervention, students will complete the Basic Writing and the Contextual Writing subtests of the Test of Early Written Language, Second Edition; the Spelling subtest of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement, Third Edition; and the Letter Naming Fluency, Phonemic Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency subtests of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. Additionally, handwriting automaticity will be assessed using alphabet and sentence copying tasks, and composition will be assessed with sentence writing and essay writing tasks. Fidelity checklists will be used throughout implementation.
Data analytic strategy
Researchers will assess whether or not the intervention is associated with improvements in handwriting fluency, spelling, and composition using a residualized change analysis of covariance with a follow-up clustering correction to account for the nesting of students within classrooms. Repeated measures analysis of variance will be used to examine the change from pre- to post-test on writing and spelling to determine if children in the intervention classrooms improved more than would be expected from maturation alone. Finally, multilevel modeling will be used to examine individual differences in pre-test skills to predict response to the intervention.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Products: The final product of this study will be the fully-developed PAWS writing intervention for kindergarten students. Peer reviewed publications will also be produced.
Journal article, monograph, or newsletter
Puranik, C.S., Boss, E., and Wanless, S. (2019). Relations Between Self-Regulation and Early Writing: Domain Specific or Task Dependent? Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 46, 228-239.
Puranik, C.S., Patchan, M.M., Lemons, C. ., and Al Otaiba, S (2017). Using Peer Assisted Strategies to Teach Early Writing: Results of a Pilot Study to Examine Feasibility and Promise. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30(1): 25-50.
Puranik, C. S., Patchan, M.M., Sears, M.M., and McMaster, K.L. (2016). Examining Alphabet Writing Fluency in Kindergarten: Exploring the Issue of Time on Task. Assessment for Effective Intervention, 42(2): 81-96.
Puranik, C.S., Petscher, Y., Otaiba, S.A., and Lemons, C.J. (2018). Improving Kindergarten Students' Writing Outcomes Using Peer-Assisted Strategies. The Elementary School Journal, 118(4), 680-710.
Additional project information
Previous award details:
Previous award number:
R305A120368
Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigator: Christopher Lemons
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
