Individual and cooperative computer-writing and revising: Who gets the best results?

Draft and revised computer-written narratives were produced by IV grade children in each of three writing conditions: I/I — individual/individual, i.e. the child wrote and revised his/her narrative individually; I/D — individual/dyad, the child wrote a text individually but revised it together with another child; D/D — dyad/dyad: two children wrote and then revised a text. A set of repeated measures analyses of variance showed that childrenʹs revised narratives had more original and well-organized contents, described better story protagonists, used a more sophisticated language, contained fewer mistakes of various kinds and exhibited greater grammatical complexity than first drafts. The greatest changes from draft to revision occurred in the I/D condition; the greatest change within drafts occurred between the two individual drafts. Learning effects and effects due to cooperative writing were observed for a few parameters of text quality. The study shows that children, especially when they revise their text with a peer, are able to carry out both local and more global revisions and can do so even without explicit training.