This study investigated the effects of task repetition on the writing skills of upper level developmental reading students. On two occasions spaced one week apart, the students were presented with college-level allied health and business texts and asked to write an informational report. Although no writing instruction was provided in the interval, performance changed significantly on four of five indicators of writing skill. Productivity, use of source text, and representation of key ideas improved, which suggests that the simple repetition of meaningful literacy tasks has the potential to facilitate learning in developmental education classrooms. However, there was also an increase in copying from the sources, possibly as a result of students’ growing recognition of task difficulty.
This article was published in Journal of Developmental Education, vol. 26.
