The Impact of Direct Instruction and Cooperative Retelling using a Collaborative Podcasting tool on the Narrative Writing Skills of Upper Elementary School Children in the Inclusive Classroom
To address the writing challenges experienced by many Normally Achieving students (NA) and students with learning disabilities (LD) in the inclusive classroom, this quasi-experiment study examined the outcomes of two technology-supported instructional interventions and an untreated control group wit...
| Summary: | To address the writing challenges experienced by many Normally Achieving students (NA) and students with learning disabilities (LD) in the inclusive classroom, this quasi-experiment study examined the outcomes of two technology-supported instructional interventions and an untreated control group with pretest and posttests, and posttest only, aimed at improving the narrative writing skills of cycle 3 (Grades 5 and 6) students. The first intervention was focused on the development of oral retelling skills using a direct instruction and a cooperative retelling (CR) method. The second intervention employed a direct instruction (DI) method. Embedded within each intervention was an additional weekly remediation session given to the LD students. Both interventions required participants to listen to podcasts of folktales hosted on the Internet site VoiceThread. The same site was used by the CR group to facilitate the cooperative retelling process.
A total of 131 students, 57 Grade 5 and 74 Grade 6 students participated in the study, which lasted 5 months. While the treatments differed in their theoretical foundations and instructional interventions, both involved four cycles of folktale retelling written production. To measure the impact of the treatments, participants’ pre- and posttest written narratives were analyzed at both the microstructure level (story length and grammatical complexity as measured by the total number of T-units and syntax) and the macrostructure level (total number of episodes in the story as well as overall story coherence).
Two-way ANOVAs conducted on gain score data indicated that students in the CR conditions at both the Grade 5 and Grade 6 levels outperformed students in the DI and the Control groups on most microstructure and macrostructure dependent variables. The impact of the CR intervention was evident for both normally achieving and students with learning disabilities. With the exception of the original story measure for the Grade 6 group, the DI intervention did not have a significant impact on participants’ narrative writing skills. The results highlight the importance of oral language skills to narrative writing and demonstrate how cooperative learning instructional methods with feedback and review, supported by technologies, facilitate the development of written narrative competencies. |
|---|