Writing Coaches help students:

Are we effective?

Bonner Middle School teacher Jami Fabatz has been an enthusiastic user of writing coaches for several years.  Last year she decided she needed objective data to confirm what she was already observing in her classroom.

Ms. Fabatz contacted the University of Montana for help with a possible study.  In the fall of 2015 a graduate student from UM's English Teaching Program designed a research project to study Ms. Fabatz's 35 8th grade students who had been given the same persuasive writing assignment.  20 students were randomly selected to receive two rounds of coaching from WCM writing coaches; the other students were given assistance from fellow students only. Neither the coaches nor the students were aware of the study.

Two trained readers blindly scored the final papers using an analytic rubric covering five key ares. When scores were compared between the two student groups, the researcher observed that:

• "...students who receive two rounds of writing coaching through the drafting process perform favorably in a persuasive writing assignment compared to peers who participate in classroom instruction and peer-review alone."
• top performing students benefited more than low performing students, suggesting that these students are better equipped to internalize and incorporate coach feedback into their writing.

In addition, written feedback from students indicated that uncoached students were most likely to receive help from their peers on lower-order writing skills such as grammar, usage, and mechanics. Students who worked with writing coaches reported benefiting from discussions on the more substantive aspects of writing such as the quality and organization of their ideas.

While this unpublished study is preliminary and relies on a relatively small sample size, it points clearly to the efficacy of our program and the benefits of individualized writing support from trained coaches. We hope that more teachers will open their classrooms to investigations of this kind in the future as part of WCM's ongoing offort to understand and optimize how we support student writing.