A Direct Functional Measure of Text Quality: Did the Reader Understand?

Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality may not only comprise linguistic aspects but also the cognitive-functional power of a text. The presented study aims at exploring the functionality of students’ reporting texts in relation to general text-quality measures, using a corpus of accident reports written by German fifth- and ninth-graders (n = 277) prompted by a pictorial stimulus of a bike accident scenario. An online tool was developed in which 277 university students graphically reenacted the situation from one respective text according to the existence, position, and color of the involved elements. Thereafter, the match of the resulting spatial reconstructions with the original situation was assessed by two raters. While most subscales showed sufficiently high interrater reliabilities, the aggregated functionality score (α =.74) had medium-high correlations with other text-quality ratings and was comparably dependent on grade, education level, and linguistic family background. However, the correlational pattern, regression analysis, and factor analysis showed that the functionality score also contributed unique portions of variance to the assessment of writing skill that were not represented by rating measures. Moreover, the direct indication of whether a text allows for the reader’s adequate cognitive representation is evident. Altogether, the approach of indicating text functionality through practical understanding offers a sound, though empirically laborious, alternative for text-quality measurement. Results are discussed with regard to the didactical strategy according to which students can improve their writing when they observe whether others can make use of their texts

Schreibförderung lernen: Lehramtsstudierende als Schreibcoach/innen - ein Lehrexperiment

Die hohe Diversität (schrift-)sprachlicher Fähigkeiten von Lernenden erfordert, Lehrkräfte differenziert auf den adäquaten Umgang damit vorzubereiten. Dazu wurde ein Seminar entwickelt, das ein sprachdidaktisches Konzept der halbstandardisierten, individuellen Rückmeldung zur Textqualität förderbedürftiger Schüler/innen vermittelt. In einem Lehrexperiment mit Lehramtsstudierenden des Faches Deutsch (BA vs. MA) wurde das Seminar durchgeführt und in einem Prä?Post-Follow up-Design evaluiert. Erste Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich die Studierenden unabhängig von ihrer Studienerfahrung verbessern und die Nachhaltigkeit der Leistungssteigerung je nach Aufgabenformat variiert. 13.10.2017 | Marei Kotzerke, Moti Mathiebe & Joachim Grabowsk

Teaching perspective taking and coherence generation to improve cross-genre writing skills in secondary grades: A detailed explanation of an intervention

This paper gives an analytic description of why and how an instructional writing program on the improvement of cross-genre writing skills in German secondary grade level has been designed and implemented. From a diagnostic research phase, and according to theoretical expectations, coherence management and perspective taking proved to be ability components that substantially contribute to text quality across different genres. To train these two abilities in a didactical setting, two 11-unit writing courses were analogously constructed and administered in 5th and 9th grades. There were 12 intervention classes and 12 control classes in each grade, forming 48 classes with 1.145 participants. The decisions that lead to the design of the intervention study and the corresponding didactical settings are explained and justified in detail, and the developed self-learning materials are described in terms of their assumed learning potentials and the underlying didactical principles. Based on the obtained empirical experiences, the intervention is critically evaluated with respect to good intervention research and its proper description