Supporting Teachers in Argument Writing Instruction at Scale: A Replication Study of the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP)

Abstract

This article provides a replication study of the National Writing Project’s College, Career, & Community Writers Program (C3WP), which was found to be effective at improving student writing quality in two prior studies. C3WP is designed to improve students’ source-based argument writing through intensive teacher professional development, instructional resources, and formative assessment. In this study, we used a randomized controlled trial design, randomizing 22 of 44 rural districts into 1 year of C3WP for their grade 7–9 English language arts teachers. We collected argument writing from all students using a performance task similar to those in many state assessments, and we scored the writing for attributes of writing quality and conventions. We found that C3WP led to statistically and meaningfully significant findings on all attributes measured (g = 0.20–0.22). We interpret this study as validating the effects of C3WP on student argument writing quality and providing evidence that C3WP also positively impacts students’ writing conventions. These three separate studies of C3WP spanned 228 diverse schools in 20 states, providing an unusually robust body of rigorous, independent evidence of program effectiveness.

Keywords:

• Randomized controlled trial
• replication
• argument
• writing
• professional development
• rural
• networked improvement communities
• scale

Acknowledgements

We thank the students, teachers, schools, and Writing Project leadership, staff, and members who participated in the study, as well as the project staff from SRI International. We owe a particular debt to researchers H. Alix Gallagher, Allison Milby, Andrew Praturlon, and Kristen Rouspil. The authors assume responsibility for any errors. As part of the grant funding this project, this study was pre-registered with the National Evaluation of Investing in Innovation; a copy of this pre-registry can be accessed at the Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies (REES) as study 14340.

Open Research Statements

Study and Analysis Plan Registration

This study is registered on the Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies (REES Registry ID 14340).

Data, Code, and Materials Transparency

The data, code, and materials that support the findings of this study are not publicly available.

Design and Analysis Reporting Guidelines

The authors submitted a completed copy of the JREE Checklist for Randomized Trials for this manuscript.

Transparency Declaration

The lead author (the manuscript’s guarantor) affirms that the manuscript is an honest, accurate, and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned (and, if relevant, registered) have been explained.

Replication Statement

This manuscript reports a replication of the following study: “Gallagher, H. A., Arshan, N., & Woodworth, K. R. (2017). Impact of the National Writing Project’s College-Ready Writers Program in High-Need Rural Districts. Journal of Research on Effectiveness in Education, 10(3), 570–595. DOI: 10.1080/19345747.2017.1300361”

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Preregistered through Open Practices Disclosure. The materials are openly accessible at https://sreereg.icpsr.umich.edu/sreereg/subEntry/16680/pdf?action=view.

Notes

1 The study being replicated was conducted under the program’s original name, the College-Ready Writers Program (CRWP).

Additional information

Funding

This article was prepared by SRI International with funds provided by the National Writing Project under an Investing in Innovation Scale-up grant from the U.S. Department of Education (grant #U411A160004). However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the U.S. Federal Government.