Date of Award

8-1-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Teaching, Leadership & Professional Practice

First Advisor

Jared Schlenker

Abstract

This study examines the impact of the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) on upper-elementary students' first draft writing quality, addressing the challenges teachers face in providing timely and effective feedback on extensive student writing, particularly in spelling, grammar, mechanics, and cohesion. The hypothesis posits that C3WP resources will improve students' writing by enhancing lexical cohesion and reducing surface-level errors. Four 6th-grade students with varying reading proficiency levels participated in two C3WP mini-units over a two-month period. First drafts were analyzed using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Text Cohesion (TAACO) to measure semantic overlap and lexical cohesion, alongside error rates in spelling, grammar, mechanics, and punctuation. Results showed significant improvements in semantic overlap and lexical cohesion, with increased scores in binary adjacent and two-sentence overlaps, and repeated content lemmas (the base form of a word as it appears in a dictionary, used for analysis in linguistics and lexicography). Error analysis revealed a notable reduction in spelling and capitalization errors across all proficiency levels, although grammar and some mechanics errors increased slightly due to more complex writing tasks. The findings indicate that C3WP resources effectively enhance the quality of first draft writing by promoting better coherence and reducing surface-level errors. These results suggest that the program can significantly improve writing skills, providing valuable insights for educators seeking to adopt innovative instructional methods.

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