Utilizing Technology-Based Self-Regulated Strategy Instruction to Bolster Narratives of Secondary Students With Disabilities

Strong fictional and personal narrative storytelling skills enable individuals to express their imaginative ideas, intelligence, and personal experience. However, most secondary students with disabilities experience significant difficulty writing narratives. The effects of a technology-integrated version of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) for the POW (Pick my genre then idea, Organize my notes, Write and say more) + STACS (Setting, Tension, rising Action, Climax, and Solution) secondary-level narrative writing strategy were evaluated for 16 eighth-grade students with disabilities and significant writing difficulties. The investigation was broken into two studies: Study 1 was a treatment-control group design and Study 2 was a pre-/post design for students who were part of the Study 1 control group. Both studies documented statistically significant, large effects for between- and within-group comparisons for story grammar element, strategy-specific element, essay length, and narrative-genre identification measures following technology-based SRSD for POW + STACS strategy lessons. Implications for practice are discussed.