1. Effects of intervention on self-efficacy and text quality in elementary school students' narrative writing.
- Author
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Grenner, Emily, Johansson, Victoria, van de Weijer, Joost, and Sahlén, Birgitta
- Subjects
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STATISTICS , *ANALYSIS of variance , *SELF-management (Psychology) , *MOTIVATION (Psychology) , *LINGUISTICS , *TASK performance , *COGNITION , *SELF-efficacy , *ACADEMIC achievement , *SEX distribution , *SOCIOECONOMIC factors , *LEARNING strategies , *RESEARCH funding , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics , *SCHOOL children , *WRITTEN communication , *ELEMENTARY schools , *STATISTICAL correlation - Abstract
Self-efficacy for writing is an important motivational factor and considered to predict writing performance. Self-efficacy for narrative writing has been sparsely studied, and few studies focus on the effects of writing intervention on self-efficacy. Additionally, there is a lack of validated measures of self-efficacy for elementary school students. In a previous study, we found that a trained panel rated personal narrative text quality higher for girls than for boys, which led to our aim: to investigate boys' and girls' self-efficacy for narrative writing before and after an intervention, and to explore associations between self-efficacy and text quality. An 18-item self-efficacy scale was developed. Fifty-five fifth-grade students (M 11:2 years, SD 3.7 months) filled out the scale before and after a five-lesson observational learning intervention. Self-efficacy was then related to writing performance as measured by holistic text quality ratings. The students demonstrated strong self-efficacy, which increased significantly post-intervention. Girls and boys demonstrated similar self-efficacy, despite girls' higher text quality. There were moderate correlations between self-efficacy and writing performance pre- and post-intervention. The results support previous findings of strong self-efficacy at this age. The interaction between writing self-efficacy and performance is complex. Young students may not be able to differentiate between self-efficacy, general writing skills, task performance, and self-regulation. Self-efficacy scales should thus be carefully constructed with respect to age, genre, instruction, and to students' general educational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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