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It''s about time! Lengthen student writing.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Our goal was to engage fourth-grade writers to write longer and more meaningful pieces of writing given the time set aside for writing. Using a convenience sample with 17 fourth-grade students in two classes in a rural West Texas elementary school, we found that when given time as the constraint, children were better able to stay on task and, in fact, they wrote more than students that were constrained by length.

Introduction

This work grew out of a developing partnership between one small, rural West Texas elementary school district and a university professor responding to a call by the Regional Educational Service Center serving the school to improve the writing performance in grades K-8. The school was searching for a way to improve writing across the entire school curriculum with a concentration in fourth-grade because the school was labeled low performing by the Texas Educational Agency based on the results of the prior year's Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) writing exam at the fourth-grade level. In my role as writing consultant to the school, I engaged in a larger study of the impact of reflection on teaching and learning. The larger study included students and teachers in grades 2 through 6 with a focus on writing pedagogy. This qualitative study is seeking to understand more about the role of reflection in professional development, especially as reflection impacts the teaching of writing in elementary school classrooms. This paper grew out of that collaborative relationship as participating teachers and I began to explore ways to increase the length of fourth grade writing. I will report the results of a study in fourth grade writing aimed at increasing the length of student writing.

The project goal was to find a way to encourage fourth-grade student writers to compose longer and more meaningful pieces. I am only concerned here with the quantity of writing and not the quality of that writing. Several factors influenced this decision. First, the writing model I followed strongly supported the notion that before students could develop the motivation to improve quality of writing they had to see themselves in the role of author Calkins, 1994). In addition, the underlying notion that as quantity of writing increased the quality of that writing would soon follow (Murray, 1997). I reasoned that length may be...

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