Good writing skills are essential for the school education and participating in the society. However, results of government reports show that students have lower writing competencies in secondary schools in Germany (Stanat et al. 2017). This reveals the necessity to promote students writing competencies. Meta-analyses demonstrate that self-regulated writing strategy instruction is one of the most effective approaches to develop students' writing competence and to support their text production (Graham et al., 2012). This paper presents the concept of a writing strategy training, which was developed in the framework of the government funded project "Die Textprofis", and aims to give valuable insights into the implementation process in secondary track schools in Germany. The over-arching research question is which challenges or aspects play a role in the transfer and implementation of writing strategies.
The writing strategy training comprises the summarization of podcast episodes by 5th graders, as summarization has been proven to be a highly effective task for this age group (Philipp, 2015). The training concept is based on the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) (Harris & Graham, 2017). The students receive scaffolds and direct instruction in order to write a summary by explicit modeling.
This quasi-experimental intervention study was implemented by 106 teachers from 48 schools (experimental group), who completed the professional development training in a blended-learning course format. The control group consists of 35 teachers from 20 schools. A pretest and posttest design was used to determine the students' knowledge of writing strategies. After the writing strategy training, students, teachers and expert advisors completed a questionnaire to evaluate the training. To gain insights into the implementation process, interview data were collected from teachers and expert advisors.
Preliminary results show that the professional development training is essential for the transferability and usefulness of writing strategies. Qualitative interview data support these two scales, as well. Qualitative analyses reveal that acceptance, feasibility, cost-benefit ratio play an important role in the transfer and implementation of self-regulated writing strategies, too. Students' preliminary results will be discussed with respect to change in their writing competence and knowledge of writing strategies. Overall, this study contributes to the promotion of writing strategies and to improving our understanding of which factors are essential in the transfer and implementation of writings strategies.
Graham, S.; Harris, K. & Mceown D. (2012). A Meta-Analysis of Writing Instruction for Students in the Elementary Grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104 (4), 879.
Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (2017). " Self-Regulated Strategy Development: Theoretical Bases, Critical Instructional Elements, and Future Research". In Design Principles for Teaching Effective Writing. Leiden, Niederlande: Brill.
Philipp, Maik (2015). Schreibkompetenz. Komponenten, Sozialisation und Förderung. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.
Stanat, P., Schipolowski, S., Rjosk, C., Weirich, S., & Haag, N. (Hrsg.) (2017). IQB-Bildungs- trend 2016. Kompetenzen in den Fächern Deutsch und Mathematik am Ende der vierten Jahrgangsstufe im zweiten Ländervergleich. Waxmann Verlag.
