Children's writing ability: The impact of the pictorial stimulus

A previous study by Cole, Muenz, Ouchi, Kaufman, and Kaufman (1997b) demons trated that the type of stimulus used to elicit a written response had a ma rked impact for items measuring organization, unity, coherence, and so fort h. However, the aforementioned study had a notable limitation: the sample w as comprised only of older adolescents and adults. The current study sought to replicate the Cole et al. study with a more appropriate sample. The cur rent sample was comprised of 29 randomly selected middle school students; t he mean grade was 6.76 (SD = 0.74) and the mean age was 12.35 years (SD = 0 .90). Participants were asked to write two stories, one that was based on a line drawing from the Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised (PIAT-R) Written Expression Subtest, and one based on criteria by Hooper et al. (19 94). Stories were scored on ten items that measured writing mechanics, and ten items measured thematic, organizational items. As predicted by the Cole et al. results, items measuring written mechanics did not show a differenc e between the two prompt types, whereas items measuring thematic, organizat ional writing were significantly higher for stories written to the Hooper e t al. style prompt. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.