An exploratory pretest and posttest investigation of the effects of the self-regulated strategy development approach to writing instruction on middle school boys' writing achievement

This exploratory investigation examined the effect of instruction in the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD; Harris & Graham, 1996) writing approach on suburban seventh and eighth grade boys' writing achievement. Over a two-week period, the researcher provided seventh and eighth grade language arts teachers (N = 7) from TRMS, a suburban middle school, with six hours of professional development in the SRSD writing approach. Following the training, teachers administered a released Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) persuasive writing prompt as a pretest to 332 students. Over the next six weeks, teachers then instructed the students in the SRSD writing approach. During the instruction phase, the researcher met with teachers for one hour every week to discuss the implementation of the instruction and the challenges and successes with the process. Additionally, the researcher observed each teacher one time per week for 10 minutes to monitor the fidelity of implementation of instruction. At the end of the six weeks of instruction, teachers administered a released CMT persuasive writing prompt as the measure of students' achievement.;Results indicate that for both boys and girls, at all grade levels, the mean posttest score was significantly higher than the mean pretest score. No significant differences were observed between boys' and girls' mean scores on either the pretest or the posttest. Despite significant improvements in both boys' and girls' writing achievement, there is no real way to know whether instruction in the SRSD writing approach (Harris & Graham, 1996) had any effect on either group. This question remains because neither random assignment of subjects nor control group was used in this study.;Notably, there were no significant differences observed in the mean for boys' and girls' pretest and posttest scores on released CMT persuasive writing prompts. This result is counter to national trends in assessment of students 'writing (Clark, Oakley, & Adams, 2006; Kafer, 2004). Analyses of cumulative data revealed that girls continue to outscore boys in writing.