The effects of paired discussion during prewriting stage of composition

The effects of children engaged in paired discussion during the prewriting stage of composition was investigated. Eight out of twenty students in a regular fourth grade classroom in a midwestern city served as subjects in the experimental group while the remaining twelve students served as the control group. These eight subjects were divided into four pairs with two pairs identified as being poor writers and two as good writers. Each day all subjects were assigned a writing task related to a daily reading assignment. A multiple baseline across subjects design combined with descriptors was used. The dependent variables consisted of (1) the number of ideas generated and (2) the number of words written in the daily compositions. The study consisted of a baseline phase and treatment phase. During the baseline phase the subjects had 15 minutes of whole group discussion followed by 15 minutes writing time. The treatment phase consisted of five minutes of whole group discussion, 10 minutes of paired discussion followed by 15 minutes of writing time. The results supported one of the three hypotheses across all groups. The first hypothesis, maintaining that paired discussion would result in an increase in ideas generated over baseline condition, was not supported by any group. More ideas were consistently generated during group discussion than during paired discussion. The second hypothesis, maintaining that paired discussion would result in more ideas being written, was supported by seven of the ten groups with the greatest gain in ideas written made by the identified poor writers. The third hypothesis, maintaining that paired discussion would result in an increase of total words written over baseline condition, was supported by all groups. Even though all subjects did increase the total number of words written, the largest gain in total words written was made by the identified poor writers. The results of this study do support using paired discussion as a prewriting activity. Paired discussion did result in more ideas being generated during composition, particularly with poor writers, and did result in more words being written by good and poor writers