THE head and three teachers at the Holy Trinity Episcopal primary school in Stirling were worried about the standard of writing among their pupils. So they embarked on research into their own teaching to see if they could make an improvement.
They experimented with a number of sound and simple ideas, checked the results, and applied themselves consistently to the project as a piece of educational research.
They concluded that teaching children about paragraphs, and talking to them about learning and assessment made a real difference to children’s confidence and competence. Giving out the same messages in different cotexts also helped.
Children were expected to apply what they had learned in one lesson to writing with a different teacher on another topic. The report by Patricia Atkinson, Lillian Clark, Angela Donnelly and Kitty MacCallum appears in the latest Observations - an on-line newsletter of the Scottish Teacher Researcher Support Network (STRSP).
Its address is: http:www.scre.ac.uktprobservationsobs15obs15atkinson.html
The STRSP itself can be found at: http:www.scre.ac.uktprstrsn.html
Readers can email suggestions on future Internet Insights to Sam
Saunders at J.P.Saunders@leeds.ac.uk
