Effects of Hand-Drawn and Computer-Generated Concept Mapping on the Expository Writing of Middle School Students with Learning Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of two forms of concept mapping, hand-drawn and computer-generated, on the descriptive essay writing of middle-level students with learning disabilities. Twelve eighth-grade students composed descriptive essays under three conditions: no-map support, handmap support, and computer-map support. The essays were compared on four measures: number of words, syntactic maturity, number of T-units, and holistic writing scores. Writing attitude was also examined. Results showed that student descriptive essays produced in the handand computer-mapping conditions demonstrated significant increases above baseline writing samples on number of words, number of T-units, and holistic writing scores. Carry-over effects were observed in the no-mapping condition and provide an indication that students may have acquired writing skills that generalized into their essay writing when not using maps. Results showed that students’ attitudes toward writing were significantly more positive in the computermapping condition when compared to no-mapping and hand-mapping conditions. Writing involves a wide range of cognitive skills and processes. Writers must be able to keep a single theme in mind, generate products in the correct syntactic and semantic form, as well as remember and produce words correctly (Outhred, 1989). Even for the skilled writer, written language production can be a trying experience. Requests for reprints should be sent to Janet Sturm, Ph.D., CCCSLP, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Medical School, Wing D, CB# 7190, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7190. E-mail: [email protected]. For students with learning disabilities, the term “writer’s block” may take on a whole new meaning. Producing fluent, written text independently can be a consistent, major problem for these students. Skilled expository writing becomes increasingly important to all students as they enter the secondary grades. Secondary students are expected to compose longer documents, to use complex text and sentence structures, and to integrate and manipulate information from a variety of sources. Written expositions place additional, and unique, cognitive demands on student writers. Students must have knowledge of a variety of text structures, many of which are ill-defined, and must be able to employ each structure in the appropriate context (Thomas, Englert, & Gregg, 1987). While composing, they must be able simultaneously to hold in memory the text structure, the intention of the complete composition, and the previous sentence (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1984). For students with learning disabilities (LD) who have difficulty monitoring metacognitive resources, expository writing can be especially demanding. Skilled writers approach writing tasks by selecting writing goals, choosing topic and audience, generating ideas, and organizing their information while simultaneously engaging in a recursive movement between planning, composing, and revising processes. In contrast, research has demonstrated that students with LD have a variety of difficulties employing strategies in all phases of the writing process. Students with learning difficulties have been described as using knowledge-telling writing strategies (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987); they treat writing as a question-answering task, quickly telling whatever comes to mind. This ineffective strategy results in writing products that are shorter and less sophisticated. LEARNING DISABILITIES PRACTICE 125 Students who struggle with writing have been observed to have difficulty with both low-level (e.g., conventions and mechanics) and high-level (e.g., organization and generation of content) aspects of the composing process. Some written language features common to writers with LD include difficulties with conventions, handwriting, setting goals, content generation, organization and cohesion, sentence structure, and evaluating and revising their writing (MacArthur, Schwartz, & Graham, 1991; Scott, 1989). Writers with learning disabilities have been noted to focus on writing conventions (e.g., spelling) and, therefore, may be unable to effectively execute higher-level cognitive processes during the writing process (Graham et al., 1991; MacArthur & Graham, 1987). Research has demonstrated that students with LD have difficulty choosing the appropriate text structure and framing relevant information (Graham et al., 1992). In addition, from a language perspective, students with LD have been noted to demonstrate gaps in vocabulary, as well as weak word, phrase, sentence, and discourse structures (Ehren, 1994). These language difficulties have a confounding impact on both the writing and classroom performance of these students. The struggle of these students with written language and the often-accompanying poor attitude frequently results in a progressive pattern of academic failure. Research conducted by Graham, Schwartz, and MacArthur (1993) confirmed the poor attitudes of students with LD through Likert surveys and open-ended interviews. Results showed that fourththrough eighth-grade students with LD viewed writing less positively than their normally achieving counterparts and cited motivation as the most common reason for their writing difficulties. Prewriting strategies support the writing process for all types of writing. Planning before writing has been described by Flower and Hayes (1981) as the “hero” of the writing process because it supports writers in setting goals, brainstorming, organizing ideas, and deciding text structure. As writers juggle the multiple constraints (e.g., spelling, word choice, sentence cohesion, and text coherence) of the writing process, access to content and text structure developed in planning activities may permit reallocation of cognitive resources and allow students to engage in and better monitor higherlevel writing processes. Expert writers have been noted to engage in extensive planning (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). In contrast, students with LD spend less than one minute planning in advance of writing (MacArthur & Graham, 1987). In a review of the literature, Newcomer and Barenbaum (1991) observed that students with LD have been noted to have ineffective and immature planning strategies. As a result, the compositions of students with LD are “marked by irrelevancies, redundancies, mechanical errors, early terminations, and lack of organization and coherence” (p. 587). This study examined the effects of concept mapping, a planning strategy also known as cognitive mapping, flowcharting, semantic mapping, semantic webbing, and graphic organizers. Concept mapping is an instructional strategy used to categorize information into a graphic form, creating a visual representation of the text structure and associated personal knowledge within that display. Concept mapping may be used to activate knowledge prior to composing and to scaffold students’ memory in all phases of the writing process by assisting students to see word, concept, and category relationships. Concept mapping has been used in a variety of classroom applications for vocabulary development, reading comprehension, study skills, and prewriting organizers. Studies investigating the effects of concept mapping on academic writing have shown that students’ essays contained a greater recall of ideas and details (Draheim, 1983; Ruddell & Boyle, 1989), higher levels of organization and cohesion (Kaminski, 1993; Ruddell & Boyle, 1989), increased length (Ruddell & Boyle, 1989), improved holistic scores (Ruddell & Boyle, 1989; Zipprich, 1995), and improved endof-grade writing test scores (Pereisich, Meadows, & Sinatra, 1990). In several of these studies (Draheim, 1983; Peresich et al., 1990; Ruddell & Boyle, 1989; Weisberg & Balajthy, 1987), students wrote essays summarizing their reading of an expository passage. This required reading component could have a confounding effect on subsequent writing for students who struggle with comprehending and understanding text. Specifically, the quality and content of their summary essays could be negatively influenced by the need to utilize text content obtained in the reading task. The research conducted by Kaminski (1993), Schultz (1986), and Zipprich (1995) were the only identified concept mapping studies that assessed student writing free of a required expository reading task. Additional research is needed that examines the effects of concept mapping as a prewriting strategy when reading comprehension is not necessary to produce a quality written text. Concept mapping is an instructional strategy used to categorize information into a graphic form, creating a visual representation of the text structure and associated personal knowledge . . . . Concept maps typically have been generated using paper and pencil. However, computer software now offers students an alternative mode for producing concept maps. InspirationTM (Inspiration Software, 1988– 1993), the software program used in this study, functioned as a tool for students to create concept maps. Like hand-drawn maps, computer-generated maps are graphic representations of text structure and personal knowledge. However, this software tool allows students to move ideas around with mouse control, to easily add 126 STURM AND RANKIN-ERICKSON: EFFECTS OF CONCEPT MAPPING ON WRITERS WITH LD and delete concepts and ideas, to color-code concepts and relationships, to use symbols to represent ideas, and to check the spelling of words used on the map. A central question of this study was to understand whether the writing produced from computer-generated maps created with a flexible software tool would be different from the writing produced from hand-drawn maps. In this study, the concept mapping strategy was introduced using teaching techniques shown to be effective with students with LD. Strategy instruction is a teaching approach that assists students in developing strategies for all phases of the writing process and teaches selfregulation of performance of the strategies. Strategy instruction assists struggling student writers by breaking down writing tasks and making the subprocesses and skills much more explicit. A number of intervention studies have shown that students with LD can be taught to use writing strategies effectively (e.g., DeLaPaz, 1999; Graham & Harris, 1989; Graham & Harris, 1993; Graham et al., 1992; MacArthur et al., 1995). Writing strategy instruction has focused on teaching students how to set goals, engage in self-regulation, and evaluate their performance during the writing process. Successful interventions have heightened learner awareness of task demands, taught and modeled task-specific strategies, provided guidance and feedback, and provided opportunities to generalize skills (Seidenberg, 1988). The goal of writing strategy instruction is to assist students with developing independent skills for planning and monitoring their writing that will allow them to move beyond lower-level processes and shift their cognitive resources to the higher-level features of writing. Principles of strategy instruction were used in this study to teach concept mapping as a tool that could support students throughout the writing process. This study investigated the effects of two forms of concept mapping, hand-drawn and computer-generated, on the descriptive essay writing of middle-level students with learning disabilities. However, because research is limited on the effects of concept mapping as a strategy to support writing, both concept mapping conditions