Writing to Read: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Writing and Writing Instruction on Reading.

Meta-analysis of true and quasi-experiments (Harvard Educational Review 81(4), 710-744)

School-age students across the elementary and secondary range

Meta-analysis of true- and quasi-experimental studies testing whether writing and writing instruction improve READING outcomes - the reverse direction from the rest of this subject. Recorded because it supplies the strongest available reason to teach spelling and sentence construction that does not depend on their effect on composition: their effect on reading. Grade C for the usual reason - a mixed-design corpus.

Three findings. Writing about material that has been read improves students' comprehension of it. Teaching students how to write improves their reading comprehension, reading fluency, AND word reading. Increasing how much students write enhances their reading comprehension. The word-reading result is the one that matters for the spelling topic - it is the same transfer Graham & Santangelo (2014) report from the spelling side, arrived at independently, and it means the code-level writing work has a payoff that is real even though composition quality does not move.

Low for direction; true- and quasi-experimental designs. The usual caveat about researcher-scored outcomes applies less here than elsewhere in this subject because several reading outcomes (word reading, fluency) are measured with standardised instruments.