Do your students or kids struggle with writing? You’re not alone and this writing intervention is here to help you and your students!
RoboCogger is a developmentally appropriate classroom-based writing intervention to increase student writing self-efficacy beliefs, attitudes about writing, and writing self-regulation, and ultimately, improve student writing engagement and achievement.
What will my students learn?
- How to set writing goals
- How to track their mastery experiences with writing tasks
- How to graph and manage progress on their writing goals
- How to maintain a journal about their success and challenges with writing tasks
- How to self-assess and track their writing attitudes
- How to self-assess and track their writing self-efficacy
What are some other educational benefits?
- Encourages students to manage writing projects across curricular domains (e.g., English essays, science reports)
- Can encourage strategic classroom conversations around student writing beliefs and strategies
- Can be used by teachers as a formative assessment of student writing goals, progress, and motivation
- RoboCogger is accessible to all learners. Unlike traditional apps that can only be used with hand-held devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets), the RoboCogger web app is available for use by learners with access to all electronic devices with internet connections, including computers, smartphones, and tablets.
What is the research behind this?
Though skillful writing is fundamental to students’ academic and occupational success, a recent report of student writing achievement (U.S. Department of Education, 2011 Writing Assessment) showed only 27% of eighth and twelfth-grade students tested proficient in writing; merely 3% of students performed at an advanced level. Findings also revealed that Asian and white students scored above their peers—evidence of the achievement gap seen in many other subjects. These results are in line with a consistent trend of poor writing scores in all grades across the nation for the past several years (Greenwald et al., Mazzeo, 1999; Persky et al., 2003; Salahu-Din et al., 2008).
Writing self-efficacy is a potent predictor of student writing success (Collie et al., 2016; Bruning et al., 2013; Graham et al., 2017; Pajares, 1996; Shell et al., 1989) and research shows that mastery experiences—student successes and failures with tasks—and feedback from others are the most influential sources of student self-efficacy beliefs (Pajares et al., 2007). Specifically, students’ beliefs in their ability to use rules of writing and their belief in their ability to self-regulate during writing are linked to their success (Zumbrunn et al., 2020).
Self-regulation—the personal management of one’s motivation and learning during writing activities—also is critical to student writing success, as composing is generally self-planned and self-sustained (Zimmerman & Risemberg, 1997). Research has shown that students with higher levels of self-regulation also have higher self-efficacy ratings (Ekholm et al., 2015; Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994) and higher levels of achievement (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2007; Zimmerman, et al., 1992) than their peers with weaker self-regulation skills.
Using RoboCogger consistently has been shown to improve writing self-regulation and writing self-efficacy. As a result, writing achievement will then improve for students!