Don't Underestimate What Children Can Write (Graves)

This article was delivered as a 15-min talk at the National Commission on Excellence in Education. It nicely summarizes the NIE study and addresses some "big picture" questions about the study. It appears is A Researcher Learns to Write.

This information is the by-product of our New Hampshire study of what children do when they write. The study, funded by the National Institute of Education, made it possible for three researchers to take two years to record the details of what children do when they write. This was not an experimental design. Rather, it was a detailed study of how writers developed. As fast as we gathered the information, we shared it with the teachers. The teachers used what made sense to them. Because teachers used this new information to help children write better, we found out more about children's development. (167)

Our research tries to make sense of that jungle by showing what the writing process is, what problems children solve when they write, and the rough orders of the writer's development. (168)

We wanted our information to aid teachers to give more timely help at all stages of the writing process. (168)

We also hoped that our mapping expedition of writer's development and the writing process would help school curricula designers and publishers. (168)

What did we find?

We found many rough orders of development that could help teachers see what children were doing when they wrote... The ingredients of the writing process were the same for all ages. Their use was another matter (169)

The purpose of research is to make generalizations, to find something in one human being that can be used with another. We did come up with information that would help teachers know generally where they were with the children in the midst of the process. But as the study progressed, individual exceptions within the data increased. In short, every child had behavioral characteristics that applied to that child alone. At first I was discouraged until I realized that the deeper the data got, the more the differences would be highlighted. Every child had similarities with others, but the differences were very important. (169)

The National Institute of Education has only been funding research on the writing process since 1977. We are just beginning to find out what children do in the writing process. Based on these early findings we have some inkling of how to help them. But on this  Lewis and Clark expedition into understanding more about writing, we are only twenty miles west of St. Louis. What then is needed? We need more research gathered in schools, over sufficient time to report children's patterns of development. (170-71)

The translation of research into actual classroom use has taken too long partly because of the way in which we have gathered the information, the arcane language used to report it, as well as a lack of researchers who know how to function in a school setting. Basic researchers need to know more about teaching and teachers need to know much more about basic research. (171)

In the past, we have focused on children's errors. For this reason we have grossly underestimated children's ability to write and to think. They have perspectives about what they are doing that we miss from day to day because we don't let them write or speak. (171)