The Importance of High-Quality Writing Prompts

From the Marshall Memo #430

In this Elementary School Journal article, Amy Crosson, Lindsay Clare Matsumura, Richard Correnti, and Anna Arlotta-Guerrero of the University of Pittsburgh examine the quality of writing tasks that teachers give students (in this case, grade 4-5 English language learners writing in Spanish). They found the quality of the text and the cognitive demand of the writing task had a direct impact on the quality of students’ writing, most notably their use of academic language. Here are two examples:

• A high-quality writing task – Grade 4 students were asked to read the chapter book Esperanza Rising, which deals with social class, identity, and renewal, and then write a six-paragraph essay analyzing how two characters in the book changed. 

• A low-quality writing task – Grade 5 students were asked to read two one-page passages about the life of Thomas Edison and then compare and contrast the passages by completing a worksheet about how the texts were similar and different. 

The difference in the quality of student writing in response to these prompts (quoted verbatim in the article) couldn’t be more striking. Students responding to the first wrote long, thoughtful essays using a range of vocabulary and sentence structures. Students responding to the second filled in the blanks using short sentences and used a very limited range of vocabulary.

“The Quality of Writing Tasks and Students’ Use of Academic Language in Spanish” by Amy Crosson, Lindsay Clare Matsumura, Richard Correnti, and Anna Arlotta-Guerrero in Elementary School Journal, March 2012 (Vol. 112, #3, p. 469-496), http://bit.ly/HJawTI