Assessing Writing Motivation: a Systematic Review of K-5 Students' Self-Reports.

For attaining success in writing, motivation is essential. Crucially, instruction is dependent on knowing the student's capabilities and inner drives. To date, research on writing has yet to establish a consistent framework for assessing writing motivation, and often fails to acknowledge students' self-reports, rather favoring evaluations of students' writing motivation made by others, such as teachers and researchers. This limbo state originates partly from a general skepticism towards the trustworthiness of elementary students' self-reports. Nonetheless, the validity of such self-reports has been acknowledged in adjacent fields, such as reading. Aiming to establish a knowledge base from studies addressing students' voices, the present study adopts the method of a systematic review and investigates how writing motivation has been assessed in empirical studies (1996-2020) through K-5 students' self-reports. Of the 7047 studies identified through database search, 56 met the inclusion criteria and are examined in this review. Results indicate that (a) storytelling is the genre most used to operationalize writing in the investigations, (b) surveys and interview questions measuring students' attitude towards writing are the most common type of self-report used, and (c) students' voices are weighted differently across the studies. Findings suggest that future research should (1) work to counteract existing biases in writing tasks, (2) provide a rationale for their choice/design of measure of motivation, and (3) report clearly whose voices are being heard (e.g., students', teachers', or researchers') and the appropriateness of this choice regarding study purpose, design, and findings. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10648-023-09732-6.

The process-disruption hypothesis: how spelling and typing skill affects written composition process and product.

This study investigates the possibility that lack of fluency in spelling and/or typing disrupts writing processes in such a way as to cause damage to the substance (content and structure) of the resulting text. 101 children (mean age 11 years 10 months), writing in a relatively shallow orthography (Norwegian), composed argumentative essays using a simple text editor that provided accurate timing for each keystroke. Production fluency was assessed in terms of both within-word and word-initial interkey intervals and pause counts. We also assessed the substantive quality of completed texts. Students also performed tasks in which we recorded time to pressing keyboard keys in response to spoken letter names (a keyboard knowledge measure), response time and interkey intervals when spelling single, spoken words (spelling fluency), and interkey intervals when typing a simple sentence from memory (transcription fluency). Analysis by piecewise structural equation modelling gave clear evidence that all three of these measures predict fluency when composing full text. Students with longer mid-word interkey intervals when composing full text tended to produce texts with slightly weaker theme development. However, we found no other effects of composition fluency measures on measures of the substantive quality of the completed text. Our findings did not, therefore, provide support for the process-disruption hypothesis, at least in the context of upper-primary students writing in a shallow orthography.

Developmental dynamics of early reading skill, literacy interest and readers' self-concept within the first year of formal schooling.

Previous studies have documented robust relationships between emergent literacy and later reading performance. A growing body of research has also reported associations between motivational factors and reading in early phases of reading development. However, there is less research about cross-lagged relationships between motivational factors and reading skills in beginning readers. To examine relationships between early reading skills, literacy interest and reader self-concept, we tested 1141 children twice during their first year of formal reading instruction in school. Cross-lagged analysis showed strong stability in reading skills and medium stability in literacy interest and reader self-concept over the first school year. We also found bidirectional relationships between reading skills and self-concept and between the motivational components of literacy interest and reader self-concept. In the final part of the article, we address the potential theoretical progress attainable through the use of cross-lagged designs in this field.

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages.

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217-236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.

The status of the concept of 'phoneme' in psycholinguistics.

The notion of the phoneme counts as a break-through of modern theoretical linguistics in the early twentieth century. It paved the way for descriptions of distinctive features at different levels in linguistics. Although it has since then had a turbulent existence across altering theoretical positions, it remains a powerful concept of a fundamental unit in spoken language. At the same time, its conceptual status remains highly unclear. The present article aims to clarify the status of the concept of 'phoneme' in psycholinguistics, based on the scientific concepts of description, understanding and explanation. Theoretical linguistics has provided mainly descriptions. The ideas underlying this article are, first, that these descriptions may not be directly relevant to psycholinguistics and, second, that psycholinguistics in this sense is not a sub-discipline of theoretical linguistics. Rather, these two disciplines operate with different sets of features and with different orientations when it comes to the scientific concepts of description, understanding and explanation.

The notion of 'phonology' in dyslexia research: cognitivism--and beyond.

Phonology has been a central concept in the scientific study of dyslexia over the past decades. Despite its central position, however, it is a concept with no precise definition or status. The present article investigates the notion of 'phonology' in the tradition of cognitive psychology. An attempt is made to characterize the basic assumptions of the phonological approach to dyslexia and to evaluate these assumptions on the basis of commonly accepted standards of empirical science. First, the core assumptions of phonological awareness are outlined and discussed. Second, the position of Paula Tallal is presented and discussed in order to shed light on an attempt to stretch the cognitive-psychological notion of 'phonology' towards auditory and perceptual aspects. Both the core assumptions and Tallal's position are rejected as unfortunate, albeit for different reasons. Third, the outcome of this discussion is a search for what is referred to as a 'vulnerable theory' within this field. The present article claims that phonological descriptions must be based on observable linguistic behaviour, so that hypotheses can be falsified by data. Consequently, definitions of 'dyslexia' must be based on symptoms; causal aspects should not be included. In fact, we claim that causal aspects, such as 'phonological deficit', both exclude other causal hypotheses and lead to circular reasoning. If we are to use terms such as 'phonology' and 'phoneme' in dyslexia research, we must have more precise operationalizations of them.

Aspects of fluency in writing.

The notion of 'fluency' is most often associated with spoken-language phenomena such as stuttering. The present article investigates the relevance of considering fluency in writing. The basic argument for raising this question is empirical-it follows from a focus on difficulties in written and spoken language as manifestations of different problems which should be investigated separately on the basis of their symptoms. Key-logging instruments provide new possibilities for the study of writing. The obvious use of this new technology is to study writing as it unfolds in real time, instead of focusing only on aspects of the end product. A more sophisticated application is to exploit the key-logging instrument in order to test basic assumptions of contemporary theories of spelling. The present study is a dictation task involving words and non-words, intended to investigate spelling in nine-year-old pupils with regard to their mastery of the doubling of consonants in Norwegian. In this study, we report on differences with regard to temporal measures between a group of strong writers and a group of poor ones. On the basis of these pupils' writing behavior, the relevance of the concept of 'fluency' in writing is highlighted. The interpretation of the results questions basic assumptions of the cognitive hypothesis about spelling; the article concludes by hypothesizing a different conception of spelling.