The process approach: Its effects on the composition writing ability of public elementary school pupils in the National Capital Region (NCR)

This experimental study determines the effectiveness of process approach-based lesson plans and workbooks in developing composition writing skills in English among selected grades I to VI pupils of some selected elementary schools of the DECS-National Capital Region.The curriculum materials for field testing included a set of teacher\u27s manual with accompanying pupil\u27s workbook for each of the six grade levels in a regular public elementary school. The pretest-midterm test-posttest control group design was used in the study. The 3,000 experimental and control group subjects numbered 1,500 in each group of five schools. In every experimental and control school, the middle section of each grade level represented the tryout class of more or less 50 heterogeneously-grouped pupils. The instruments for data gathering included a teacher\u27s profile, grades I to VI pre-tests, midterm tests and posttests, ESL composition profile, and observation checklist. Monitoring activities consisted of orientation and regular meetings, daily classroom observations and feedback sessions. Data gathered were subjected to inter-rater reliability, one- and two-way repeated measures, and item analysis with reliability and correlation coefficients. As findings of the study, high coefficients were obtained from the raters\u27 marking of 240 compositions sampled in each writing test. On the whole, these ranged from .723 to .962 and were found significant at the .05 and .01 levels. When the same data were subjected to two-way repeated measures design, overall mean score increments ranging from 17.134 to 30.001 were noted in favor of the experimental group. Mean score differences were also found significant at the .05 and .01 levels.Based on the findings, the following conclusions were drawn:1. The process approach-oriented curriculum materials enabled the grades I to VI pupils to write improved compositions.2. There were significant overall differences in incremental scores in all five (5) criteria, i.e. -- content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics, between the process approach-based compositions written by public elementary school pupils and the compositions written by their counterparts in a control group