Date of Award
8-2012
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Psychology
Advisor(s)
Tanya L. Eckert
Keywords
academic intervention, generality, generalization, maintenance, performance feedback, writing
Subject Categories
Psychology
Abstract
Although writing ability is a skill that has been argued to be equally important as reading skills in the development of early literacy and is necessary for academic success (Berninger et al., 2006; Graham, MacArthur, & Fitzgerald, 2007), national estimates of students' writing ability in the United States indicate that in 2002, 72% of elementary-aged students were unable to write with grade-level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). This finding presents a clear need for empirical, evidence-based interventions that aim to improve students' writing skills, and performance feedback is one type of intervention that has been shown to do so (Eckert et al., 2006). However, no study to date has examined the generalization and maintenance of writing fluency gains that have been developed as a result of performance feedback interventions. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether 51 third-grade students assigned to a performance feedback intervention condition demonstrated evidence of greater (a) writing fluency gains, (b) generalization of writing fluency, and (c) maintenance of writing fluency in comparison to 52 students assigned to a practice-only control condition. Results revealed that although students assigned to the performance feedback condition demonstrated significantly greater writing fluency growth during the course of the intervention than students assigned to the practice-only condition, evidence for maintenance and generalization of intervention effects was limited. These findings suggest that, in isolation, performance feedback may produce short-term desired effects on students' writing fluency growth, but that explicit programming of generality may be required to produce long-term achievement gains.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Hier, Bridget, "Generality of Treatment Effects: Evaluating Elementary-Aged Students' Abilities to Generalize and Maintain Fluency Gains of a Performance Feedback Writing Intervention" (2012). Psychology - Theses. 1.
https://surface.syr.edu/psy_thesis/1
