RR 91-7 Teaching writing with a new instructional model: Variations in teachers' beliefs, instructional practice, and their students' performance.
Abstract
Fifteen upper-elementary teachers (regular and resource room) agreed to enact a new instructional model called Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing (CSIW). The model emphasized that teachers should model the cognitive processes of writers, scaffold dialogue with students about their writing, and create a social context in which writers considered audiences and purposes for their writing. Special attention was paid to text structures used in reading and writing expository text. Teachers' enactment of CSIW was analyzed for its degree of congruence with the developers' vision of writing instruction, and there was significant variation among the teachers in their patterns of enactment that was related to variation in student performance. Those students whose teachers were considered to be "more congruent" (i.e., enacting the model in ways intended by the developers) had better performance on transfer measures (but not on direct measures of what was taught), compared to students whose teachers used the model in "less congruent" ways. Qualitative data about four teachers are drawn upon to support conjectures about relationships among teachers' beliefs about teaching, learning, and writing, their instructional practice, and their students' writing performance.