Psychological Research and Writing Strategies

All writing teachers and coaches have a toolbox of strategies, tips, and tricks for helping stuck learners. Practical experience is key, but academic studies offer another helpful perspective. At the very least, psychology can flesh out our intuitions and convictions.

science works

We recently read an academic paper that is a “meta-analysis of meta-analyses” about writing intervention strategies. Meta-analyses are papers that take a pile of studies on some effect, summarize them, and analyze them to determine, roughly, how big or important that effect is. They are a great way of opening up vast and sometimes inaccessible academic literature on a topic.

This paper goes a step further and summarized twenty summaries on writing interventions in elementary and high school students. (And here we will summarize this summary of summaries!) It is a good survey what hundreds of experiments and intervention actually say about what works.

Empirically validated writing interventions

So, what works? In a way the results are not surprising. The most robust effect for improving student writing is teaching writing strategies for planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Informed students can make best use of their time and effort. Interestingly, the most effective and reliable way to improve student writing was to supplement teaching the strategies with what the authors call a “self-regulated strategy development model”, which basically means teaching the skills that allow students to actually plan, draft, edit, and revise when they need to. The results vindicate importance of building skills around motivation, which are very different from just knowing the procedure.

Equally important is knowing what doesn’t work. While most of the strategies that teachers use are at least somewhat effective, one strategy that was mostly ineffective, and possibly counterproductive, was explicit teaching of grammar rules. This speaks to the disconnect between knowing about writing and actually implementing the process of writing. In general, process-focused strategies fared quite well.

As editors and writing consultants, we take this work to vindicate parts of our approach. For adult learners, the trouble is usually not with lack of knowledge of planning, drafting, revising, or editing. The trouble lies one step back, as it were. Getting better at writing usually means having the skills to do what you know you should do, and often we need other humans to help us out of our bad habits.

Further reading:

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (2017). Evidence-based writing practices: A meta-analysis of existing meta-analyses. In Design principles for teaching effective writing (pp. 13-37). Brill.