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Children's writing ability: The impact of the pictorial stimulus
Author(s) -
Cole Jason C.,
McLeod Jennifer S.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
psychology in the schools
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.738
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1520-6807
pISSN - 0033-3085
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1520-6807(199907)36:4<359::aid-pits8>3.0.co;2-8
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology
A previous study by Cole, Muenz, Ouchi, Kaufman, and Kaufman (1997b) demonstrated that the type of stimulus used to elicit a written response had a marked impact for items measuring organization, unity, coherence, and so forth. However, the aforementioned study had a notable limitation: the sample was comprised only of older adolescents and adults. The current study sought to replicate the Cole et al. study with a more appropriate sample. The current sample was comprised of 29 randomly selected middle school students; the mean grade was 6.76 ( SD = 0.74) and the mean age was 12.35 years ( SD = 0.90). Participants were asked to write two stories, one that was based on a line drawing from the Peabody Individual Achievement Test–Revised (PIAT‐R) Written Expression Subtest, and one based on criteria by Hooper et al. (1994). Stories were scored on ten items that measured writing mechanics, and ten items measured thematic, organizational items. As predicted by the Cole et al. results, items measuring written mechanics did not show a difference between the two prompt types, whereas items measuring thematic, organizational writing were significantly higher for stories written to the Hooper et al. style prompt. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.