Use syntactic complexity as a sensitive developmental marker to monitor children's writing progress in the upper elementary grades¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 5 claims (5 for) · 2 studies (2 associational), q3 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 5 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article recommends a specific assessment practice: "syntactic complexity could be considered an important developmental marker of written language, and thus a sensitive indicator to monitor children's progress in writing." This follows from the finding that syntactic complexity showed a clear developmental progression between fourth and sixth grade even though text length and story content did not, and despite a general lack of syntax-focused instruction in current writing curricula.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Narrative writing samples scored for mean length of a t-unit in words, following the coding scheme used in the study

Constraints¶

• Validated in this study only for narrative picture-elicitation tasks in grades four to six; the authors note narrative writing does not cover writing-to-learn activities

Target Learners¶

• children in the upper elementary grades (fourth to sixth grade)

Target Learning Goals¶

• monitoring growth in written syntactic complexity

Claims¶

• Sixth-grade syntactic complexity of narrative writing is predicted by fourth-grade oral grammar, inhibition, and planning in addition to initial syntactic complexity [+W]
• Syntactic complexity of narrative writing increases significantly between fourth and sixth grade, while text length and story content do not [+W]
• Transcription skills are not longitudinally predictive of syntactic complexity in the upper elementary grades, consistent with their declining influence as handwriting and spelling automatize [+W]
• Executive functions do not directly predict syntactic complexity or story content once transcription and language skills are controlled [+W]
• In a cross-sectional path model of fourth graders, handwriting fluency statistically mediated the relation between inhibition/updating and all narrative outcomes (text length, syntactic complexity, story content) [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Use progress monitoring to tailor math instruction to each child's position on a developmental progression
• Sentence Combining

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Drijbooms, E., Groen, M. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2017). How executive functions predict development in syntactic complexity of narrative writing in the upper elementary grades. Reading and Writing, 30, 209–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9670-8