About the Project
Writing competence is a fundamental skill and essential for expressing thoughts and emotions, communicating opinions, and participating in democratic society. My PhD project focuses on writing skills in the middle grades, examining different aspects of writing quality in narrative and argumentative texts.
The project has three main objectives.
Main objectives
The first is to investigate various dimensions of writing quality and how these are related to overall writing quality and other key literacy skills. In particular, we explore the relationship between reading comprehension and word decoding in Grade 6 and aspects of writing quality in Grade 7, as well as the role of perspective taking and writing motivation in writing quality.
The second objective is to examine audience awareness and the adaptation of texts to specific readers. We investigate how students revise and adapt an existing text for a younger audience.
The third objective is to explore whether students’ ability to take another person’s perspective is associated with the extent to which they benefit from an intervention focused on audience awareness in Grade 6.