Teaching Web Making As a Guided Planning Tool to Improve Student Narrative Writing

In a multiple-baseline aba design across three groups, 13 intermediate-level elementary students with learning disabilities and poor writing ability were taught during a 4-month study how to use a prestructured story web as a technique to improve their narrative story writing ability. performance was measured by 12 target behaviors. Students showed improvement in the two primary target behaviors of planning time and holistic (quality) score following instruction in the web technique, but showed inconsistent results for the other target behaviors of number of words, thoughtunits, density factor, sentence types (fragments, simple, compound, compound/complex), and mechanics (spelling, capitalization, and punctuation). analysis of data included both visual-graphic and mean-to-mean comparisons across phases and individuals. Research to further develop and define the effectiveness of the story web technique as well as other writing instruction strategies is recommended.