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Evaluating effects of different forms of revision instruction in upper-primary students

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Abstract

This study aimed to establish (a) whether teaching students revision skills provides benefit over and above teaching strategies for setting explicit goals for the communicative effect of their text, and (b) whether teaching students to adopt specific revision strategies provides benefits over revision instruction that focusses on increasing students’ awareness of audience needs. Six classes of Spanish sixth-grade students (N = 107, 11–12 years) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In all three conditions students were taught to set communicative goals. Students in the Strategy Focused condition were then taught a 6-step revision strategy. Students in the Reader Focused condition observed a reader trying to comprehend a text and suggesting ways in which it might be improved. Students in a control condition continued with goal-setting practice. Students’ writing performance was assessed through composition and revision tasks before and immediately after intervention, 2 months post-intervention, and for transfer to an untaught genre. Writing performance and revision skills improved more in the two revision-instruction conditions than for students in the control condition. The improvements were large, persistent and transferred to a different type of text. We found no statistically significant differences between the two revision conditions. Findings suggest that specific revision instruction benefits sixth-grade students’ writing performance and revision skills, but that strategy-focused and reader-focused approaches are similarly effective.

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Notes

  1. A more detailed description of both revision interventions strategy-focused and reader-focused, but not their evaluation, is provided in López et al. (2018).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank staff and students at the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús-Jesuitas and Nuestra Madre del Buen Consejo-Agustinos de León Schools for their assistance in completing this study.

Funding

This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad de España) Grant EDU2015-67484-P awarded to the fourth author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy, Faculty of Education, University of León, Campus de Vegazana s/n, PC. 24007, León, Spain

    Paula López & Raquel Fidalgo

  2. Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Mark Torrance

  3. Research Institute for Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gert Rijlaarsdam

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  1. Paula López
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  2. Mark Torrance
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  3. Gert Rijlaarsdam
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  4. Raquel Fidalgo
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All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the design of the work, analysis and data interpretation, drafting and revising the manuscript critically and approved it for publication.

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Correspondence to Raquel Fidalgo.

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Appendix

Appendix

Appendix 1: Revision task

figure a

Appendix 2

See Tables 6, 7 and 8.

Table 6 Word count and text quality ratings by condition and test occasion
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Table 7 Model fit statistics: likelihood ratio χ2, degrees of freedom, p
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Table 8 Test statistics for test of the null hypothesis that change between pre-test and subsequent test (post-test, follow-up, transfer) was the same in the control group and the intervention group
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López, P., Torrance, M., Rijlaarsdam, G. et al. Evaluating effects of different forms of revision instruction in upper-primary students. Read Writ 34, 1741–1767 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10156-3

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