Effects of Teacher Prompting Techniques on the Writing Performance of Fourth and Fifth Grade Students
Abstract: The study was a quantitative research investigation to determine the effects of teacher prompting techniques on the writing performance of 137 fourth and fifth graders from two parochial schools in West Virginia. Over a two week period in March - April, 2014, students wrote three writing samples prompted by the teacher with: no prompting, general prompting, and content specific prompting. The major outcomes assessed were frequency of words, sentences, and average sentence length, and Flesh-Kincaid writing ease and complexity levels. Data analysis included several types of descriptive and inferential statistical techniques. The results showed no significant differences in students’ word productions or sentence lengths across the types of teacher writing prompts. However, a trend emerged which suggested complexity scores increased as teacher prompting became more content specific. A corollary analysis revealed a significant difference in word production between boys and girls.