Implementing Peer-Assisted Writing Support in German Secondary Schools

The alarming results of large studies such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012) point to an urgent need for writing support and call for specific and effective methods to foster writing competencies. The main purpose of this paper is to describe an innovative peer-assisted approach designed to foster text composition. Topping's (2001) step-by-step-algorithm was converted into a board game consisting of highly structured and motivating materials in order to encourage struggling writers to work on their text production skills. Our concept is based on two effective instructional strategies: "direct instruction" (Kame'enui, Fien, & Korgesaar, 2013) and "positive role modeling" (Macklem, 2011). In addition to describing our concept, this paper reports on initial experiences with this method in two German secondary school classes. A total of 47 fifth-grade students and their teachers were involved in a formative evaluation of our approach as a means of identifying strengths and weaknesses as seen by the participants. The feedback of both students and teachers was encouraging, giving rise to the hope that the concept presented in this paper can be smoothly implemented into everyday classroom routines and serve as an aid for children and youth with learning disabilities (LD) and other struggling writers to improve on their text production abilities. Our study was a pilot study and, consequently, we are unable to provide information on how effective the intervention actually is. Summative evaluation of the performance gains will be the subject of future research.