The principal aim of strategy-focused instruction is to teach students strategies to control their writing processes and achieve quality writing. For this purpose, nine 4th grade Elementary School classes from three different schools (N = 215) were randomly allocated to two forms of strategy-focused program called cognitive self-regulation…

Background: Traditionally writing instruction at the start of school has focused on developing students' ability to spell and handwrite. Teaching children explicit self-regulatory strategies for developing content and structure for their text has proved effective for students in later grades of primary (elementary) education. Aims: The present…

We report a multiple-baseline single-case study, based in the response to intervention framework, evaluating transcription-only and transcription-and-planning interventions for young, struggling writers. In a baseline phase, 8 classes of Spanish children at the start of their first year of primary (elementary) education completed short, probe…

Background: Strategy-focused writing instruction trains students both to set explicit product goals and to adopt specific procedural strategies, particularly for planning text. A number of studies have demonstrated that strategy-focused writing instruction is effective in developing writing performance. Aim: This study aimed to determine whether…

We compared 56 eighth-grade students who, 28 months previously, had received instruction in strategies for planning and revising their writing, with 21 students of similar academic ability from the same school who had not experienced the intervention. Both groups wrote an expository essay whilst logging their writing activities and completed…

Seventy-one normally functioning Spanish sixth-grade students participated in classroom-based training in cognitive strategies for preplanning and substantive revision of expository text. Short essays completed by these students pre-intervention, post-intervention, and after a 12 week delay were compared with those of an ordinary-curriculum…