A Motivational Writing Intervention: Exploratory Observations on Elementary Students’ Text Length
Abstract
This single-case study, employing an ABA design, examined the effect of combined motivational methods on the length of stories written by six elementary school students with reading and writing difficulties. The intervention comprised explicit timing, immediate feedback, and positive reinforcement. Although these methods have shown promising results in other academic domains, evidence for their effectiveness in German‑language writing tasks and for specific ages and grade levels remains limited. This gap motivated the present small preliminary study. Three girls and three boys in third and fourth grade participated. The study used a preplanned number of baseline and intervention sessions, resulting in 10 planned data collection sessions for each child. The dependent variable was the total number of words written in response to a randomly selected story prompt. Results indicate changes in the total number of words written that coincided with phase transitions, with mostly higher values during the intervention phase and visual phase-separability across participants. These observations are interpreted in light of the study’s exploratory design and lead to recommendations for further research to evaluate the robustness and generalizability of any potential intervention effect.