Supporting Relational Reasoning through Compare–Contrast Composition in Students with Writing Difficulties: Effects of the TREE BRANCH Strategy

The composition of compare–contrast essays provides an authentic context for developing relational reasoning, because it requires students to identify, organize, and communicate meaningful similarities and differences between concepts. However, learners with substantial writing difficulties often struggle to coordinate the planning, text generation, and revision processes required for this demanding genre. One promising yet still underexplored instructional approach is the TREE BRANCH strategy, which combines explicit compare–contrast writing instruction with self-regulation. This multiple-baseline study examines the effects of an intervention on the amount and quality of text generated by four fifth-grade students attending a German public lower-track secondary school. Productivity was operationalized as Total Words Written (TWW), while text quality was assessed using an analytic rubric reflecting higher-order features of compare–contrast writing. Across 11 measurement occasions, visual, descriptive, overlap, and regression analyses converged in indicating improvements in both outcomes following intervention onset, with continued gains throughout the intervention phase. The findings provide preliminary evidence that the TREE BRANCH strategy may support the written expression of relational reasoning by enabling students to produce longer, better organized, and more sophisticated compare–contrast texts. By combining writing outcomes with direct assessments of relational reasoning, future studies could provide further insight into the cognitive mechanisms underlying the intervention and extend the evidence base through larger samples and follow-up assessments.