The Impact of Daily Interactive Writing on First-Grade Achievement 

From the Marshall Memo #442

In this Journal of Early Childhood Literacy article, Kate Roth (Harvard Graduate School of Education) and Kathleen Guinee (Northeastern University) report on their study of Interactive Writing in six urban first-grade classrooms for a full school year. Interactive Writing is widely used in primary classrooms but hadn’t been researched systematically before Roth and Guinee’s study. 

Interactive Writing is a daily, unscripted approach to teaching writing skills. First, the teacher and students come up with a short, meaningful text – for example, “In the summer we have vacation. We go to camp and to the beach, the pool, and amusement parks.” The class might also decide to write a short letter, record the results of a science experiment, summarize or extend a story, or label a mural. Next, the teacher shares the marker with students as they write the text onto an easel letter by letter, space by space, and word by word, continuously re-reading the text as it’s written and discussing the writing skills being used. For example, the teacher might ask the student who came up to write the first two words, “Why did you write a capital I?” Roth and Guinee explain the Interactive Writing dynamic: “Children are viewed as apprentices who work alongside a teacher who is the expert writer. In addition to guiding children in the act of writing, the teacher might ‘think aloud’ to model for the children processes related to writing, such as how to spell a word, how to form a letter, or how to revise.” 

Interactive Writing took the teachers in this study 7-14 minutes a day and was used to complement and strengthen the Writers Workshop segment of the literacy block. “During Interactive Writing,” say Roth and Guinee, “children are more supported by an adult in their writing development, and the actual instruction is more multifaceted than during a Writing Workshop mini-lesson, which is designed to address a single particular topic related to writing, often specific to writing craft (e.g., how to write a good lead sentence or using descriptive words to make writing more interesting)… During Interactive Writing, children have a balance of explicit instruction and authentic participation in meaningful writing activities.” 

What did Roth’s and Guinee’s study find? Students whose teachers used Interactive Writing started lower than the control group in independent writing proficiency and surpassed them by the end of the study. Interactive Writing students made greater gains in nine out of ten writing subcomponents: Ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency, spelling of high-frequency words, spelling of other words, capitalization, punctuation, and handwriting (both groups did equally well on spacing skills). These gains came from an average of only 10½ minutes a day.

What accounts for such impressive results from so little instructional time? Roth and Guinee believe it’s because Interactive Writing is systematic and explicit in addressing language conventions, concepts about print, types of writing, and writing traits; “instructionally dense” (each lesson includes multiple goals); differentiated (the teacher is strategic about which students are called up to write letters and words); and involves meaningful text and an authentic context. “These teaching moments evolve from the teacher’s understanding of the students’ needs as opposed to following a set sequence,” say the authors, “and thereby allow all children to participate in a conversation about the details of print and how written language works. Further, the students are engaged throughout the lesson as members of a community of writers as they write over the course of the year on many topics and in many genres that are relevant to what they are studying across the curriculum.” 

“Ten Minutes a Day: The Impact of Interactive Writing Instruction on First Graders’ Independent Writing” by Kate Roth and Kathleen Guinee in Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, September 2011 (Vol. 11, #3, p. 331-361), http://ecl.sagepub.com/content/11/3.toc