Effects of Guided Journal Writing on Students' Story Understanding

The authors investigated the effects of guided journal writing on students' understanding of themes and main characters in a complex novel. Three English 12 classes were randomly assigned to 1 no-writing condition and 2 writing conditions—character clues and general-response questions. The results from 2 posttests consistently indicated that students who wrote significantly surpassed students who did not write. Student self-ratings data...