Teaching Middle School Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities to Write Essays Persuasively

• In Event: Emotional and Behavioral Supports and Interventions

Abstract

A multiprobe multiple baseline design was used to investigate the impact of Self-Regulated Strategy Development for persuasive writing for middle school students with Emotional and/or Behavioral Disorder who attended an inclusive public middle school. Six students learned to plan and write both one paragraph and multiple paragraph essays. Once mastery of the one paragraph essay fluently in ten minutes was mastered students than learned how to expand the essay into a multiple paragraph. After approximately 4 months of instruction, finding indicated that all students had mastered SRSD components and increased from baseline to posttesting, maintenance, and generalization phases found increases in persuasive essay parts, number of transition words, and holistic quality of essays.

Authors

• Nancy Irby Cerar, George Mason University

• Margo A. Mastropieri, George Mason University