Chapter 7, page 130
or attempt to rebut any opposing arguments (De La Paz & Graham, 1997). The study focused on the
strategy of goal setting. The research question was whether students who learned to set goals to support
their opinions with more arguments and to rebut opposing arguments would write more effectively than
students who did not learn to set these goals.
There were three groups of students in the experiment. Students in all groups were learning to write
opinion essays. Students in the goal setting group were taught to set goals for how many reasons they
would write that supported their opinion and how many times in their essay they would refute a
counterargument that could be made against their position. The second group, the goal setting plus
strategy group, set goals as indicated above, and they also learned a six-step strategy for writing opinion
essays shown in Figure 7.2. Students in the control group learned to write opinion essays, but did not
participate in goal setting and did not learn the six-step strategy. Students in each of the three groups wrote
a series of three essays.
Figure 7.2:
A six-step strategy for writing opinion essays- Read the essay topic and identify my opinion (premise)
- Brainstorm and write down enough ideas so that the goal could be satisfied
- Write the essay, including the ideas that were brainstormed
- Read the essay to see if all the ideas were included
- Modify the essay by including brainstormed ideas not included.
Add new ideas as needed.
Or modify ideas that were already included to make them better. - Check to see if the goal was met.
Return to Step 5 if it was not.
from Page-Voth & Graham (1999, p. 234).Students’ essays were scored according to how many argument components they included in their
essays. Specifically, students’ scores were computed based on the number of supporting reasons for their
position, the number of times they elaborated their reasons with some details, the number of times they
refuted counterarguments that could be made against their position, and the number of times they provided
supporting details for these refutations. Students’ essays were also scored holistically for overall holistic
quality by raters who did not know which group (goal setting, goal setting plus strategy, or control) the
students had been in. The results showed that by the third essay, students in the two goal-setting groups
were strongly outperforming students in the control condition (see Figure 7.3). This study supports the idea
that having LD students set goals for their writing can lead to strong gains in their writing. In general,
training studies have demonstrated that teaching cognitive strategies to students can improve learning
substantially.