Student- and instruction-level predictors of narrative writing in third-grade students

This study examined the student-level and instruction-level predictors of narrative writing fluency and quality. Participants included 120 third-grade students from 13 classrooms. Student predictors included measures of reading, handwriting, spelling, IQ, grammatical understanding, and gender. Instructional predictors focused on the amount of time allocated to teaching basic writing skills and planning skills. Significant predictors of compositional fluency included gender, advanced planning ability, and handwriting fluency, while significant predictors of compositional quality included gender, compositional fluency, Full-scale IQ, word reading ability, and grammatical understanding. There were no main effects of instructional variables; however there were two student by instruction interactions. Implications of the study highlight the importance of student characteristics in writing achievement, as well as considering the need for differential instruction based on student needs.