The effect of a short-practice informative narrative writing program on ninth grade writing competence

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects on ninth graders' composition scores of a research-based twelve-week program of short daily practices in informative narrative writing. The effects of the program were assessed by two different measures, holistic scores and readability scores. The study also investigated the relationship between the two different scoring measures. Hypotheses. The hypotheses for the study were: 1. There will be a significant difference favoring the experimental group, pretest to posttest, between the holistic scores of students receiving the experimental program of daily practices in composition and those of the control group in the regular English program. 2. There will be a significant difference, pretest to posttest, between the readability scores of students receiving the experimental program of daily practices in composition and those of the control group in the regular English program. 3. There will be a positive correlation between the holistic assessment scores and the readability grade level scores on the composition pretests and posttests. Design of the Study. The subjects of the study were 118 ninth grade students. The type of writing chosen for the twelve-week intervention was informative narrative, as defined by Kinneavy (1971). The students in both the experimental group and the control group wrote pretest and posttest compositions which were evaluated by holistic scoring and readability scoring. During the twelve-week experiment the control group progressed through the regular English curriculum. The experimental group, while also following the regular English curriculum, spent the first ten to fifteen minutes of each class doing short research-based practices on informative narrative writing. These short daily practices continued for the first two weeks of each three-week cycle; during the third week of each cycle the students wrote an assignment synthesizing the skills they had practiced. This cycle was repeated four times to complete the twelve-week intervention. The pretest and posttest compositions were evaluated by both holistic and readability scores. An analysis of variance and t_test for significance were conducted on the scores to ascertain the effect of the intervention. A Pearson correlation was run to ascertain the relationship of the holistic and readability scores. [...]