Effects of intervention on self-efficacy and text quality in elementary school students’ narrative writing

Abstract

Aim

Self-efficacy for writing is an important motivational factor and considered to predict writing performance. Self-efficacy for narrative writing has been sparsely studied, and few studies focus on the effects of writing intervention on self-efficacy. Additionally, there is a lack of validated measures of self-efficacy for elementary school students. In a previous study, we found that a trained panel rated personal narrative text quality higher for girls than for boys, which led to our aim: to investigate boys’ and girls’ self-efficacy for narrative writing before and after an intervention, and to explore associations between self-efficacy and text quality.

Methods

An 18-item self-efficacy scale was developed. Fifty-five fifth-grade students (M 11:2 years, SD 3.7 months) filled out the scale before and after a five-lesson observational learning intervention. Self-efficacy was then related to writing performance as measured by holistic text quality ratings.

Results

The students demonstrated strong self-efficacy, which increased significantly post-intervention. Girls and boys demonstrated similar self-efficacy, despite girls’ higher text quality. There were moderate correlations between self-efficacy and writing performance pre- and post-intervention.

Conclusions

The results support previous findings of strong self-efficacy at this age. The interaction between writing self-efficacy and performance is complex. Young students may not be able to differentiate between self-efficacy, general writing skills, task performance, and self-regulation. Self-efficacy scales should thus be carefully constructed with respect to age, genre, instruction, and to students’ general educational context.

Keywords:

• Self-efficacy
• observational learning
• writing improvement
• intervention
• elementary education

Acknowledgments

We thank Martine Braaksma for fruitful discussions on observational learning intervention and self-efficacy scales. We also thank the Linnaeus environment Cognition, Communication and Learning (CCL) at Lund University and Lund University Humanities Lab where the ‘film peers” for the observational learning intervention were filmed. Lastly, we thank the anonymous reviewers, whose comments have greatly improved this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

The present work was financially supported by The Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foundation [2012.0038].

Notes on contributors

Emily Grenner

Emily Grenner is a speech-language therapist and PhD student at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Logopedics, Phoniatrics and Audiology, Lund University, Sweden. Her PhD studies concern processes and products of narrative writing in school children with normal hearing and school children with hearing loss.

Victoria Johansson

Victoria Johansson is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Centre for Languages and Literature and Deputy Director at the Lund University Humanities Lab, Lund University, Sweden. Her research focus is on language development through the lifespan, primarily cognitive aspects of writing.

Joost van de Weijer

Joost van de Weijer is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University. His research focuses on the perception of foreign-accented speech. He is also affiliated as methodologist with the Lund University Humanities Lab, where he mainly works with the analysis of experimental data.

Birgitta Sahlén

Birgitta Sahlén is a Professor in Speech Pathology at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Logopedics, Phoniatrics and Audiology, Lund University, Sweden. Her research focus is on cognition and communication in children with language disorder and/or hearing loss. Comprehension, listening effort, motivation, and learning in relation to children’s cognitive capacity. She is currently heading comprehensive intervention projects aiming at improving children’s narrative writing by observational learning, and teachers' communicative techniques for language learning interaction in the classroom.