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The effects of self-regulated strategy development on the writing process for high school students with learning disabilities.(Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model)

Article Excerpt
Abstract. Many students with learning disabilities (LD) exhibit deficiencies in the writing process. In order to achieve an adequate level of writing competence, these students must apply strategies that enable them to effectively plan, organize, write, and revise a written product. Explicit strategy instruction involving a structured style of learning has been found to increase students' writing competence (De La Paz & Graham, 1997a). The current study examined the effects of the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model on the writing performance of 15 high school sophomores with LD. Students were taught to apply the SRSD model as a strategy for planning and writing essays and to self-regulate their use of the strategy and the writing process. The effects of strategy instruction were examined using a repeated-measures design.

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Writing is an integral part of the curriculum in secondary schools; indeed, written expression is the primary medium students use to demonstrate conceptual knowledge and communicate their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs (Graham, 1982). Within an accountability system, students in high school are often expected to compose narrative, persuasive, and informational essays for state-and district-level assessments. Moreover, displaying a minimum level of competence on state and district exams is increasingly becoming a mandatory requirement for students to advance from grade to grade as well as graduate from high school. Unfortunately, students with learning disabilities (LD) often have difficulty developing writing skills sufficient to satisfy these crucial benchmarks.

WRITING DIFFICULTIES EXHIBITED BY STUDENTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES

Students with LD often experience difficulty when asked to plan, write, and revise an essay. In general, these students lack a basic knowledge about how to approach writing and the writing process as a whole. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986) identified five areas of competence that are particularly problematic for students with LD when developing an essay: (a) generating content, (b) creating and organizing structure for compositions, (c) formulating goals and higher plans, (d) quickly and efficiently executing the mechanical aspects of writing, and (e) revising text and reformulating goals.

Generating content for an essay typically begins with brainstorming. During this pre-writing phase, writers take time to reflect on their topic, select an audience, and develop ideas. Skilled writing depends, in large part, on a student's ability to plan before composing during this phase. MacArthur and Graham (1987) found that students with LD do not spend much time preparing to write. Instead, they often begin writing as soon as they are given an assignment with little or no preparation. Furthermore, students with LD tend to rely on an associative technique wherein they simply write whatever comes to mind (Thomas, Englert, & Gregg, 1987). Beginning to write immediately after receiving an assignment does not allow adequate goal setting or planning--two important techniques applied by successful writers. Subsequently, students with LD appear unsure of what to do when they are given time to plan (Burtis, Bereiter, Scardamalia, & Tetroe, 1983). Many students with LD do not regard strategies in the prewriting phase as valuable tools and fail to utilize meaningful techniques to become successful writers.

Students with LD also experience difficulty when attempting to generate content and organize a structure for compositions (Graham, 1990). This problem may be attributed to their under-utilization of strategies for retrieving useful information. Thus, these students frequently view a writing assignment as a question/answer task involving little preparation. In Graham's study, for example, when students with disabilities were given an opinion essay, they simply responded by writing "yes" or "no" (to agree or disagree), followed by a few brief reasons, and ended with no concluding statement. Graham's study demonstrated that, once students with disabilities believe they have answered a question, they often abruptly end their composition without a summation of their point of view. The end result is that very little content is generated. Barenbaum, Newcomer, and Nodine (1987) noted a similar finding: that students with LD produced substantially shorter and lower-quality stories than students who achieve typically. In most essays that Barenbaum et al. examined, the students with LD failed to frame their stories to include all of the basic elements. Instead, they generated relevant information from memory without any self-regulation, resulting in essays that were generally less coherent and organized than those of their peers without disabilities (MacArthur & Graham, 1987).

Formulating goals and objectives, a strategy that experienced writers use to plan and execute higher-level writing skills, is a third area of difficulty for students with LD (Graham, Harris, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1991). Writing can be characterized as a problem-solving task that includes identifying goals for writing as well as the means to achieve them. During and after writing, these goals are assessed to deteremine whether a student needs to redefine the goals or continue with the writing process. In a study by Graham, MacArthur, Schwartz, and Voth (1992), students chose from a list of goals that they felt their paper should accomplish. Students were then taught a strategy that broke the writing task into several parts: (a) generate product and process goals, (b) develop notes, (c) organize notes, (d) write and continue the process of planning, and (e) evaluate success at obtaining goals. After being taught the goal-setting strategy, students met the goals they had set for their essays 90% of the time.

Many students with LD seem to be unable to quickly and effectively execute the mechanical aspects of writing. Specifically, in comparison to their peers, they make considerably more spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors in their compositions (MacArthur, Graham, Schwartz, & Scafer, 1995), and their handwriting is less legible (MacArthur, Graham, & Skarvold, 1986). Basic skills like spelling, grammar, and handwriting are usually not taught at the high school level. It is likely that students with LD will continually lag behind their peers without disabilities if not taught specific strategies to improve the mechanics of their writing.

Sentence formation also tends to be problematic for some students with LD. They often lack a well-developed sense of sentence style and produce short and "choppy" sentences (Kline, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1991). Thus, the repetition of simple sentences and frequent use of run-on sentences are common mistakes exhibited by these students. By comparison, experienced writers edit for the conventions of writing as they proceed with composing their ideas and during the post-writing stage for refinement.

A final area of difficulty for students with LD is the revision of their writing. The revision process is an essential step that requires writers to "rethink" a portion of their writing by editing and rereading it many times, all the while appraising how effectively the written product communicates their intent to the audience. Students with LD often view the revision process as merely a time to correct mechanical and spelling errors, failing to realize the importance of revising and refining content (Scardamalia &...