Do goals affect the structure of students’ argumentative writing strategies?

Fourth- and sixth-grade students with and without learning disabilities wrote essays about a controversial topic after receiving either a general persuasion goal or an elaborated goal that included subgoals based on elements of argumentative discourse. Students in the elaborated goal condition produced more persuasive essays that were responsive to alternative standpoints than students in the general goal condition. Students with learning disabilities wrote poorer quality and less elaborated arguments than students without disabilities. Measures derived from the structure of students’ argumentative strategies were highly predictive of essay quality, and they accounted for the effects of goal condition, grade, and disability status. Nearly all students used the argument from consequences strategy to defend their standpoint. The implications for argumentative writing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of Historical Reasoning Instruction and Writing Strategy Mastery in Culturally and Academically Diverse Middle School Classrooms.

Seventy 8th-grade students (including talented writers, those with average ability, and students in need of special education services) participated in an integrated social studies and language arts unit designed to promote historical understandings and argumentative writing skills. The historical reasoning instruction lasted 12 days, and the writing instruction lasted 10 days. Students applied historical inquiry strategies when reading documents related to westward expansion and learned to plan argumentative essays related to each historical event. Results indicate that in comparison to 62 students in a control group who did not receive either form of instruction, students who demonstrated mastery of the target strategies during instruction wrote historically more accurate and more persuasive essays regardless of their initial learning profile. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of goal setting and strategy use on the writing performance and self-efficacy of students with writing and learning problems.

This study examined the effects of goal setting on the essays of 7th- and 8th-grade students with writing and learning disabilities. Participants wrote 3 essays, responding to a different goal for each. One half of the students used a strategy to facilitate goal attainment. Goals were designed to increase either the number of reasons supporting a paper's premise or the number of counterarguments refuted by the writer, or both. Papers written in response to goals were longer, included more supporting reasons, and were qualitatively better than essays written by students in the control condition. Students were also more likely to refute counterarguments when assigned a goal that focused on this specific element. Strategy use enhanced performance only when students were responding to a goal to refute more counterarguments. Students' writing self-efficacy was not influenced by goal setting or strategy use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of dictation and advanced planning instruction on the composing of students with writing and learning problems.

This study examined the effects of dictation and explicit instruction in planning on the composing skills of students in 5th-, 6th-, and 7th-grade with learning disabilities. Students received instruction in either (a) planning, where students learned a strategy for developing, evaluating, and organizing ideas prior to composing, or (b) comparison, where students learned about essay structure, revised sample essays, and composed and shared essays with peers. In both conditions, half the students dictated and half the students wrote their plans and essays. The combination of dictation and instruction in advanced planning resulted in more complete and qualitatively better essays in contrast to those written by students in the comparison condition on both a posttest and 2-week maintenance probe. Results indicate advanced planning is important when using dictation to compose. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Effects of Goal Instructions and Text on the Generation of Counterarguments During Writing.

The authors investigated ways of encouraging students to consider more counterarguments when writing argumentative texts. One hundred eighty-four undergraduates wrote essays on TV violence. In Experiment 1, students given specific goals generated more counterarguments and rebuttals than controls. In Experiment 2, some participants were provided with a text outlining arguments/counterarguments; some were also asked to write a persuasive letter. Prior attitudes toward the topic were also measured. Persuasion instructions negatively affected and text (without persuasion instructions) positively affected counterargumentation and the overall quality of arguments. Text was only effective, however, for students with less extreme prior attitudes. The danger of using persuasion goals and the advantages of using more specific goals (with text) are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowledge of text coherence and expository writing: A developmental study.

Attempted to relate coherence in the expository writing of 4th graders, 8th graders, and college students to their knowledge of the requirements of global coherence in expository texts. Ss performed a sentence-identification task designed to assess such knowledge and wrote 2 expository essays. Significant positive correlations were found between sentence identification and 3 measures of the rated coherence of the Ss' essays. With 1 exception, these correlations remained significant when grade was partialed out. Morever, performance on the sentence-identification and essay tasks improved from 4th to 8th grade. Scores on a holistic measure of essay coherence also improved through college age. Thus, it is likely that over a wide age range, knowledge of the requirements of global coherence in expository essays is a factor in one's ability to produce a coherent essay. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of monological and dialogical argumentation on concept learning in evolutionary theory.

In this study, the effects of argumentation-eliciting interventions on conceptual understanding in evolution were investigated. Two experiments were conducted: In the 1st, 76 undergraduates were randomly assigned to dyads to collaboratively solve and answer items on evolution; half of them were instructed to conduct an argumentative discussion, whereas control dyads were only asked to collaborate. In the 2nd experiment, 42 singletons participated in 1 of 2 conditions: Experimental students engaged in monological argumentation on their own solution and a confederate's solution in response to prompts read by the confederate, whereas in the control condition they merely shared their solutions. Conceptual gains were assessed on immediate and delayed posttests. In both experiments, students in the argumentative conditions showed larger learning gains on the delayed posttest than control students. Students in argumentative conditions were able to preserve gains that were obtained immediately following the intervention, whereas control participants either lost immediate gains (dialogical condition) or did not improve their conceptual understanding at any time (monological condition). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measuring and monitoring general health status in elderly persons: practical and methodological issues in using the SF-36 Health Survey

An action perception approach (i.e., Heider, 1958) was used to investigate the influences of qualitatively different goal-related actions on 2nd- and 5th-grade children's and college students' perceptions of actors' effort expenditure (i.e., trying) and goal desire (i.e., wanting). Actors performed three repetitive actions or three equifinal actions within 2 reward conditions (offer of reward or no reward, for attempting to attain a prosocial goal). At each age level, perceptions of effort and want varied significantly by goal-related actions, whereas reward information did not emerge as an influential factor in differentiating perceptions of effort and want. Age-related findings suggested that, compared with the college students, the children overattributed trying and wanting to the actors. In the repetitive-actions condition, both 2nd and 5th graders gave significantly higher effort and want ratings than college students did. In the equifinal-actions condition, 2nd and 5th graders gave significantly higher effort ratings than college students did.     

An evaluation of the relative effectiveness of NCTM standards-based interventions for low-achieving urban elementary students.

The effects of 2 instructional methods, problem solving and peer collaboration, were evaluated for enhancing mathematics achievement, academic motivation, and self-concept of 104 low-achieving 3rd and 4th graders. Students were assigned randomly to 1 of 4 conditions: control, problem solving, peer collaboration, and problem solving?+?peer collaboration. Students in all conditions met twice weekly for 30-min mathematics sessions over a 7-week period. Results indicate that problem-solving students performed significantly higher than their counterparts who did not receive problem solving on measures of computation and word problems and reported higher levels of academic motivation, academic self-concept, and social competence. Students who participated in peer collaboration scored higher on measures of computation and word problems and reported higher levels of academic motivation and social competence than did students who did not participate in peer collaboration. No significant interaction effect was found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The contribution of executive control to the revising by students with writing and learning difficulties.

This study examined the role of executive control in the revising problems of 8th graders with writing and learning difficulties. The contribution of executive control was examined by providing students with executive support in carrying out the revising process. Students learned to use a routine that ensured that the individual elements involved in revising were coordinated and occurred in a regular way. Compared with revising under normal conditions, executive support made the process of revising easier for students and improved their revising behavior. They revised more often, produced more meaning-preserving revisions that improved text, and revised larger segments of text more frequently when using the executive routine. Executive support also had a greater impact on the overall quality of students' text than did normal revising. Students' difficulties with revising were not due solely to problems with executive control because they also experienced difficulties with the separate elements involved in revising. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generalization of dissonance reduction: Decreasing prejudice through induced compliance.

Three studies involving a total of 318 White college students demonstrated that induced compliance can change socially significant attitudes and that the change generalizes to broader beliefs. Ss wrote an essay endorsing a pro-Black policy that was costly to Whites. In Exps 1 and 2, attitudes and general beliefs about Blacks became more favorable in both high- and low-choice conditions, provided publicity of the essay was high. Overall, choice and publicity had additive effects on attitude change. Some high-choice Ss wrote only semipositive (semicompliant) essays and did not change their essay attitudes. Yet their beliefs about Blacks still became more favorable. In Exp 3, racial ambivalence, but not prior attitude, predicted essay compliance. Ambivalent Ss were more likely to comply than were less ambivalent Ss. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Student differences in self-regulated learning: Relating grade, sex, and giftedness to self-efficacy and strategy use.

Forty-five boys and 45 girls of the 5th, 8th, and 11th grades from a school for the academically gifted and an identical number from regular schools were asked to describe their use of 14 self-regulated learning strategies and to estimate their verbal and mathematical efficacy. The groups of students from both schools included Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Students came from middle-class homes. Gifted students displayed significantly higher verbal efficacy, mathematical efficacy, and strategy use than regular students. In general, 11th-grade students surpassed 8th graders, who in turn surpassed 5th graders on the three measures of self-regulated learning. Students' perceptions of both verbal and mathematical efficacy were related to their use of self-regulated strategies. Evidence of relations between students' strategic efforts to learn and perceptions of academic self-efficacy is concordant with a triadic view of self-regulatory learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Text variations at the level of the individual sentence and the comprehension of simple expository paragraphs.

In Exps I, II, V, and VI, 274 4th–6th graders chose titles and wrote summary sentences for simple expository paragraphs. Ss did not utilize the information in topic sentences as effectively as did 116 undergraduates (Exps II and IV), but their performance improved when the topic sentence was highlighted. All Ss were better able to detect sentences that conformed neither to the paragraph's general nor specific topic than sentences conforming only to the general topic. The canonical topic comment form made deviant sentences more difficult to detect, as did the introduction of collocational ties, indicating that text variations at the level of individual sentences affected the evaluation of information that did not conform to the overall paragraph structure. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowledge, interest, and narrative writing.

One-hundred-six 9th graders and 203 undergraduates wrote a story about baseball for 25 min and then completed a 39-item multiple-choice test of baseball topic knowledge. Students also answered 6 questions about their individual interest in baseball. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that knowledge and interest tests measured different constructs. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed Grade?×?Interest and Gender?×?Interest interactions on thematic maturity. Differences favoring undergraduates at low levels of interest disappeared at higher levels of interest, and differences favoring male students at low levels of interest disappeared at higher levels of interest. Topic knowledge predicted thematic maturity and was a better predictor of the interestingness of students' written texts than was individual interest. Implications for the assignment of student writing topics are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Writing about the benefits of an interpersonal transgression facilitates forgiveness.

The authors examined the effects of writing about the benefits of an interpersonal transgression on forgiveness. Participants (N = 304) were randomly assigned to one of three 20-min writing tasks in which they wrote about either (a) traumatic features of the most recent interpersonal transgression they had suffered, (b) personal benefits resulting from the transgression, or (c) a control topic that was unrelated to the transgression. Participants in the benefit-finding condition became more forgiving toward their transgressors than did those in the other 2 conditions, who did not differ from each other. In part, the benefit-finding condition appeared to facilitate forgiveness by encouraging participants to engage in cognitive processing as they wrote their essays. Results suggest that benefit finding may be a unique and useful addition to efforts to help people forgive interpersonal transgressions through structured interventions. The Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory-18-Item Version (TRIM-18) is appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Acquisition of formal scientific reasoning by 10- and 13-year-olds: Designing a factorial experiment.

A study of 60 5th and 8th graders indicates that 8th graders who received conceptual-framework-plus-analog problem instruction generated more complete factorial arrays than did Ss who received conceptual framework alone who tended to attain perfect performance more often than Ss in the control condition. 5th-grade conceptual-framework-plus-analog Ss generated all combinations more often than Ss in either of the 2 remaining conditions, which did not differ. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individualizing a web-based structure strategy intervention for fifth graders' comprehension of nonfiction.

In the study, we investigated effects of 2 different versions of a web-based tutoring system to provide 5th-grade students with strategy instruction about text structure, which was an intervention to improve reading comprehension. The design feature assessed varied in individualization of instruction (individualized or standard). The more individually tailored version was developed to provide remediation or enrichment lessons matched to the individual needs of each student. Stratified random assignment was used to compare the effects of 2 versions of the 6-month web-based intervention. Students in the individualized condition made greater improvements from pretest to posttest on a standardized reading comprehension test (d = 0.55) than did students in the standard condition (d = 0.30). Students receiving more individualized instruction demonstrated higher mastery achievement goals when working in the lessons than did students receiving the standard instruction (d = 0.53). Students receiving more individualized instruction showed greater improvement in using signaling, better work in lessons, and more positive posttest attitudes toward computers than did students receiving standard instruction. Students in both conditions improved their recall of ideas from texts and their use of the text structure strategy and comparison signaling words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in the motivational beliefs of Asian American and non-Asian students.

This investigation explored differences in motivational beliefs of 154 Asian American and 372 non-Asian 9th graders. Students completed surveys indicating their academic beliefs and later responded to a novel task to assess their achievement behavior. The difference in type of beliefs between the two groups explained, in part, their achievement behavior. Asian American students' fear of the consequence of academic failure best explained their performance. However, this variable least explained the results for non-Asian students. Asian American students reported lower levels of self-efficacy beliefs, yet significantly outperformed their non-Asian counterparts on the task. The fear of academic failure better explained achievement motivation for Asian Americans than did self-efficacy beliefs. A major implication of this investigation is that motivational beliefs elicit different responses in different cultural–ethnic groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-advocacy and self-esteem.

Explored the utility of treating self-esteem as an attitude that might be vulnerable to the same kinds of experimental manipulations usually directed at more traditional, less consequential attitudinal issues. Within an attitudinal advocacy paradigm, 109 undergraduates wrote 3 essays either about their personality attributes or about social propositions. Half the Ss writing on each of these topics were told to advocate a positive position (i.e., self-laudatory or proposition supporting) in their essays. The remaining Ss, although induced to advocate positive positions, were led to believe that they could elect to write negative (self-deprecatory or issue-opposing) essays. As anticipated, Ss who wrote the self-laudatory essays subsequently rated themselves more favorably than did Ss who wrote in support of social propositions. The latter Ss showed a corresponding advocacy effect with regard to the social proposition that they had espoused. The manipulation of perceived choice did not influence the magnitude of the advocacy effect. The results are regarded as encouraging with respect to the application of laboratory-derived attitude change procedures to issues of high personal relevance and clinical importance. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)