The Study

Michigan State University College of Education Professor Gary Troia and colleague Brandon Monroe (Southern Connecticut State University) studied the effect on three middle school students with learning disabilities of instruction in the use of strategies to facilitate planning, writing and revising essays.

Findings

The authors point out that much of the research on strategy instruction has taken place in elementary schools, with little work conducted at the secondary level. The students in the study were from an urban middle school in the Pacific Northwest and all were classified as learning disabled in reading and writing. The researchers taught the three students in the effect group to use multiple writing strategies while writing, including a prompt for remembering the organizational structure of opinion essays to help them plan their persuasive papers. The researchers found that the three students made substantial gains in each of five quality traits on which their papers were scored. On average, the post-test scores of these students with disabilities were better by one point on a six-point scale than were those scores obtained by the control group of students with learning disabilities. In fact, the scores of the students in the effect group approached the level of writing performance exhibited by a group of peers without disabilities. “Writing strategy instruction has been established as a valid and robust approach for improving the writing attitudes, behaviors, and performance of students with and without disabilities at most grade levels and in varied contexts,” the authors conclude. “Nevertheless, the approach is not visible in most general education classrooms in which students with disabilities… receive a large portion of their literacy instruction. Typical classroom writing instruction could be improved substantially to meet the needs of poor writers if strategy instruction were integrated with process writing instruction.”

What It Means To You

How effective is the writing instruction for students with learning disabilities in those crucial middle school years in your district? Would teaching and learning improve with the use of writing strategy instruction of the sort described by Troia and Monroe?

For More Information

Monroe, B.W. & Troia, G.A. (2006). Teaching writing strategies to middle school students with disabilities. The Journal of Educational Research, 100(1), 21-33.