Long-term effects of an SRSD writing intervention for elementary school children

Abstract This study investigated the long-term effectiveness of the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) program to improve the writing skills of 2nd and 4th grade students. SRSD was used to deliver strategy-based instruction aimed to improve the quality of opinion essays. Although generally effective at posttest, the long-term efficacy of SRSD interventions on written text quality has been researched scarcely in previous large-scale intervention studies. We randomly assigned the schools were 909 Catalan-speaking children (473 boys) attended 2nd ( M age: 7 years, 5 months) and 4th grade ( M age: 9 years, 4 months) to a treatment condition or to a business-as-usual control condition. Children in the treatment condition received 11 sessions of SRSD instruction to plan opinion essays. Besides asking children to produce an initial opinion essay to determine baseline (pretest) measures, we collected writing samples at posttest, delayed post-test, mid-term follow-up, and long-term follow-up, which took place at 1 week, 4 weeks, 6 months, and 18 months after instruction, respectively. Results showed that benefits from the SRSD intervention were detectable even after 18 months had passed since the end of the intervention. The magnitude of SRSD benefits decreased over time for all measures, but were higher than pretest scores. Fourth graders retained benefits for longer than second graders for most measures. We have obtained compelling evidence of outstandingly long-lasting effects of SRSD on writing performance. However, our findings also underscore the need for continued support and practice to maintain benefits.