The Effects of Four Multimedia Writing Strategy Programs on Secondary Students’ Sentence, Paragraph, and Theme Writing

ABSTRACT This study involved a pretest-posttest control-group design in which four multimedia writing programs were tested with secondary students across a school year. These programs were based on strategic instruction and focused on the skills of writing complete sentences, paragraph writing, and theme writing. Measures included scores on practice activities and quizzes, time spent, knowledge tests about writing skills, sentence-construction scores, complete sentences scores, planning scores, paragraph-organization scores, theme-organization scores, and satisfaction ratings. All of the students who used the multi-media writing programs met mastery on all of the practice activities, quizzes, and planning and writing samples. Significant and substantial differences were found between the posttest scores of the writing students and students who received other academic instruction, as well as between the writing students’ posttest scores and posttest scores of a normative comparison group.