Research+Studies+on+the+Effectiveness+of+the+Writing+Process

In the summer of 1966, the Anglo-American conference on the teaching of English was held at Dartmouth College. This conference introduced the British approach to writing instruction and encouraged a "personal growth model" focused on student needs, interests, and linguistic growth. James Britton, a writing researcher from University of London, described writing as "the act of perceiving the shape of experience - not the evidence that it has been perceived." This was a sharp contrast to the typical (American) writing formula, which taught that writing was a matter of transcribing one's already-known thoughts.

In 1971, Janet Emig conducted a case study of six high school writers, which prompted a series of studies aimed at better understanding the writing process. Emig was critical of American writing instruction, and concluded that it was "limited and limiting" because it was dominated by a 5-paragraph formulaic approach and geared toward forcing students to produce something for teachers to criticize rather than fostering a process of imaginative thought.

In 1975, Donald Graves studied 7 year old students in two classroom environments: formal and informal. He found that children who are allowed to choose their own topics decide when to write tend to write more and in greater depth when given specific writing assignments.

These studies fueled interest in researching the writing process, leading to a series of studies in the late 70's and early 80's that examined how writers write.

However, in spite of the growing body of research, Applebee's 1981 research report, "Writing in the Secondary School: English and the Content Area" still described the typical writing teacher as an "error hunter" with "red-pencilitis" who made writing such a negative experience that students feared and hated it.

The situation wasn't any better in England. James Britton conducted a study of writing in British schools. He created a classification system to categorize student writing by audience and by purpose. He found that nearly 50% of writing was written for the teacher and very little was done for the student him/herself. Most writing was transactional, and there was little expressive or poetic writing. In other words, Britton found that writing was, by and large, not a personal or creative activity for students.

A 1992 Study determined that writing process models result in higher average writing proficiency. The students who had the highest average scores reported that they participated in writing process based instruction "almost everyday. Here is an article that I ran across that discusses the way in which this information was obtained. What Are We Measuring?

The complication with this model is that the "writing process model" is constantly evolving. It evolves in conjunction with literature, with the development with standards, the development of web 2.0 tools, and of course the students themselves. However, most evidence continues to point to the writing process approach improving student achievement when compared to traditional models for teaching composition. But research continues to point to the fact that students do better and are more engaged in a process approach than a more traditional teaching composition approach.

Most research indicates that practicing writers compose using some version of a three-stage process of pre-writing, drafting and revising, and post-writing. Effective writing processes should foster these phases and help students adapt them to meet their own writing needs.