The effects of story structure instruction on average and below average fourth and fifth-grade readers' narrative writing

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of story structure instruction on average and below average fourth and fifth grade readers' abilities to compose a narrative story. In addition, this study attempted to determine the significance of the Direct Instruction and Teacher-Directed Application steps of Direct Story Structure Instruction. The subjects were 60 average and below average fourth and fifth grade readers who scored between the 10 and 45 percentile on the California Achievement Test (county norms) reading comprehension subtest. The students were randomly assigned to either a Direct Story Structure Instructional (DSSI) condition, Story Structure Awareness (SSA) condition, or control. The DSSI students were taught a goal-based story structure that involved four explicit instructional episodes: Introduction, Story Examples, Direct Instruction, and Teacher-Directed Application. The SSA students were taught a goal-based story structure that involved two informed instructional episodes: Introduction and Story Examples. The control participated only in delayed testing. After short-term instruction, the DSSI students and SSA students took an immediate test. Twenty-four hours later, the DSSI students, SSA students, and control students took a delay test. The students wrote narrative stories for the immediate test and delayed test.;The stories were scored with respect to story structure complexity and to the presence of story structure components. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the DSSI condition and SSA condition with respect to story structure complexity (;The immediate test results suggest that the DSSI students were positively influenced by the Direct Instruction and Teacher-Directed Application to write more complex and well-formed goal-based stories. The delayed test results suggest that the positive performance was not maintained for the DSSI students which occur in the classroom context.