Collaborative Writing Project Product Evaluation 1988-1989. Evaluation Report.

A study was conducted to evaluate the final outcome of the Section 98 writing project, a 3-year collaboration between the School District of the City of Saginaw and the University of Michigan, and to successfully employ the gap reduction design with the pre- to post-test results stemming from the writing project. Students in six sections of 10th-grade American literature, inquiry and expression, were chosen as subjects to field test the writing curriculum during year 3 of the project. The treatment represented writing techniques found successful from study and piloting over the first 2 years of the project. The treatment had two different levels of intensity: a single teacher level (97 students) and a team teacher level (50 students). The 1985 national norming group from the California Achievement Test (CAT) served as the comparison group. Overall, it was found that the writing project produced notable achievement gains in excess of the national norming group in the areas of total reading, language mechanics, language expression, total language, and spelling. Results indicated that the single teacher situation was as good as, and in a couple instances even better than, the team teacher condition. (Three figures and four tables of data are included. Appendixes include components of field testing, graphs of the relative growth indexes, calculations of the relative growth indexes, and comparisons of the number tested for the comparison and experimental groups.) (MG)

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