Fostering Fourth-Grade Students’ Interest in Descriptive Writing through Interactive Writing: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Students’ interest in writing may shape how willingly they participate in and remain engaged with writing activities. This study examined whether fourth-grade students who experienced interactive writing reported different levels of interest in descriptive writing from students receiving conventional instruction. A quasi-experimental non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest design involved 76 students from elementary schools in Bone Regency, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Thirty-seven students formed the experimental group and 39 the control group. Interest was measured using a ten-item Likert-type questionnaire covering enjoyment, attraction, attention, and involvement. The experimental group’s mean score changed descriptively from 31.35 (SD = 3.98) at pretest to 77.23 (SD = 13.77) at posttest, whereas the control group changed from 30.96 (SD = 4.35) to 69.04 (SD = 10.91). An independent-samples t-test showed higher posttest interest in the experimental group, t(74) = 2.883, p = .005, mean difference = 8.19, 95% CI [2.53, 13.85], with a moderate effect size (Cohen’s d = 0.66). These findings suggest that interactive writing was associated with an additional advantage in students’ interest in descriptive writing and underscore the value of attending to affective participation alongside writing development.