Do written plans determine texts’ quality in primary school? An analysis of drafts and final texts in a collaborative writing task

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: It has been observed that the use of written pre-planning strategies has a positive effect on the quality of final texts composed by teenage and adult students, but not on those produced by primary school children. By providing evidence from a collaborative writing task, this paper aims to contribute to existent knowledge about the use that primary school children make of written pre-planning strategies and its relation to the quality of the texts produced. METHOD: Participants were sixty-six 5^th graders from two Spanish schools who wrote an expository-argumentative text in pairs. First, we analyzed the drafts to observe whether students used written pre-planning strategies and, if so, we determined their complexity level. Second, we evaluated the quality of the final texts using a rubric and quantified the number of ideas they contained to search for statistically significant differences according to whether pre-planning strategies had been used or not. RESULTS: Results show that most students used a medium-level strategy. The statistical analysis showed no relationship between the quality of the final texts and the use of written pre-planning strategies. However, final texts written by students using these strategies contained significantly more ideas. DISCUSSION: In line with other studies, we observe that the use of written pre-planning strategies is an emerging process at this age. When used, these strategies do not always have a positive effect on the quality of final texts but they do enrich their content. Therefore, they should be explicitly taught in class.