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<p>Pedagogical approaches to improving student writing vary in how directly they teach writing itself. This study reports causal impacts on writing quality from a randomized controlled trial of a program that was not designed to teach writing skills—but that was designed instead to cultivate deep reading comprehension by supporting students’ social perspective taking, academic register, and complex reasoning skills. Students in grades 4–7 (<i>N</i> = 2162) who participated in Word Generation, a discussion-and-debate-based instructional program, wrote higher-quality argumentative essays as holistically scored by a rubric (OR = 1.43, 95% CI [1.05, 1.95], <i>p</i> = .024), and used more target vocabulary words (IRR = 1.16, <i>p</i> = .046), than their control-group counterparts, while the two groups did not differ on lower-level indicators of writing quality such as essay length and connective use. This pattern of findings highlights the importance of specifying target instructional outcomes as well as the promise of fostering higher-level writing skills through support for domain-general skills that enable thinking deeply with and about text.</p>

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Improving writing without teaching it: impacts and their absence in young adolescents’ writing following a deep reading intervention

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月2日

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  • Lisa B. Hsin,
  • Emily Phillips Galloway,
  • Ziyun Deng,
  • Catherine Snow

摘要

Pedagogical approaches to improving student writing vary in how directly they teach writing itself. This study reports causal impacts on writing quality from a randomized controlled trial of a program that was not designed to teach writing skills—but that was designed instead to cultivate deep reading comprehension by supporting students’ social perspective taking, academic register, and complex reasoning skills. Students in grades 4–7 (N = 2162) who participated in Word Generation, a discussion-and-debate-based instructional program, wrote higher-quality argumentative essays as holistically scored by a rubric (OR = 1.43, 95% CI [1.05, 1.95], p = .024), and used more target vocabulary words (IRR = 1.16, p = .046), than their control-group counterparts, while the two groups did not differ on lower-level indicators of writing quality such as essay length and connective use. This pattern of findings highlights the importance of specifying target instructional outcomes as well as the promise of fostering higher-level writing skills through support for domain-general skills that enable thinking deeply with and about text.