Worland, K. M. (2014). The effects of prompt condition and genre on the writing performance of students in 3rd and 5th grade (Publication No. 3644214) [Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1624928240

University of Maryland (College Park, MD); ProQuest document ID: 1624928240; also located on UMD webpage https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/15771

The effects of oral delivery—whether students were read only the directions or were read the directions and all text and passages—on writing performance across three genres were compared.

Students in grade 3 (n=37) and grade 5 (n=26) from a total of four classrooms in a mid-Atlantic (U.S.) public school participated. Of these 63 students, 41 were general education students, 10 were English language learners only, seven received special education services and had specific learning disabilities, and five were English language learners with learning disabilities. Demographic data including ethnicity and, when applicable, additional languages spoken, were reported for the participants.

The writing quality rubric was modeled after rubrics from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) consortium and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC); the rubric was applied for all three writing genres (informational report, narrative, and persuasive). A curriculum based measure of total word count was also employed. The participants were assessed for initial writing ability using the Test of Early Written Language-Third Edition (TEWL-3), as part of developing matched pairs of participants.

Grade 3 participants performed best on average in the informational report genre of writing in comparison with the persuasive and narrative genres, while grade 5 participants demonstrated no significant difference among average performances in the three genres. Participants' writing quantity, in terms of number of words produced, was not a predictor of writing quality. Grade 3 participants also scored better on average when provided the oral delivery accommodation than without, while grade 5 participants performed no differently on average with or without the accommodation. In terms of genre, both grade 3 and grade 5 participants benefited most from oral delivery when producing narrative writing. The effects of the accommodation could not be compared between the students with learning disabilities and students without disabilities due to small numbers of the former. Limitations of the study were reported, and future research directions were suggested.