The Effects of Collaboration on Student Writing Development

Dialogic argument activities have been shown to facilitate the development of argumentative writing in young adolescents. The present study investigates the extent to which collaborative writing has a further facilitative effect, serving as a bridge between the dialogic and individual writing contexts. Over the course of one school year, a total of 54 students in two low-performing 7th grade classes participated in a twice-weekly dialogic argument curriculum of known effectiveness that included various kinds of dialogic activities addressing a sequence of four topics an individual essay as the culminating activity for each of the topics. In a quasi-experimental design, one class was randomly chosen as an experimental group and the other as a comparison group. The participation of the two classes in the curriculum was identical except that in one class students had an additional activity toward the end of each 15-session topic unit, during which they were asked to collaborate with a classmate who held the opposing view on the topic and produce a jointly written essay. The comparison group also wrote an interim essay but did so individually rather than collaboratively. Compared to st