COMPARING TWO STORY-WRITING MNEMONIC STRATEGIES: A RANDOMIZED CONTROL TRIAL STUDY

Educators often use mnemonic strategies as a prime method to help children who struggle with writing. This study analyzed 12 fourth-grade students’ stories during their participation in one of three groups. The first group learned the Ask, Reflect, Text (ART) mnemonic strategy with art media in the pre-writing/planning phase. The second group used Think-Talk-Text (T3) to verbalize aloud their story ideas before encoding text. The control group participated only in general education classroom instruction. The results indicated significant differences between the ART and T3 groups for story content; T3 also was significant different for story quality. The effect size scores indicated that ART students performed better with story content and number of words written. T3 students had the largest effect size for story quality. Writing may be one of the most challenging of the core academic tasks. Not only does a writer have to read drafts but also initially generate the text. Agatha Christie (1977), the famed novelist and playwright, described herself as having difficulties with writing as a child. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was . . . an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day (p. 42).Generating ideas, spelling the words, and organizing her texts were a challenge; yet, she learned to manage them. Today, we know much more about how to help struggling writers. To further explorethis issue, the author of this study investigated how 12 fourth-graders’ writing ability would change after learning and applying two mnemonic strategies for writing in a randomized control trial format over 17 forty-five minute sessions. The Rationale For an Empirical Comparison National Assessment of Educational Progress (2007) results documented that writing is a challenge for many students; about 40% of fourth grade students could not write at a basic level. With many students struggling with writing tasks, mnemonic strategy-instruction has renewed visibility given the implementation of response to intervention (RTI) in many schools across the United States, Canada, and other countries where teachers provide research-based, targeted programming to children who struggle with core academic skills such as writing (Gresham, 2002; Haager, Klingner& Vaughn, 2007; JimenezGlez& Rodrigo-Lopez, 1994). RTI is an instructional paradigm where teachers provide research-based programming to students and at more intensive levels as children demonstrate higher levels of need. The data resulting from curriculum-based measures collected once or twice weekly can provide the basis for special education classification, if deemed warranted by the school’s multidisciplinary team. Withthis study’s two strategies (i.e., ART and T3) that focus on visual and auditory modalities, their comparative analysis would add to the existing body of writing-intervention research literature (e.g., Graham & Perrin, 2007a, 2007b).

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