Grantee: Quill.org
Study Type: RCT
Principal Investigators: Briana Chang & Rory Lazowski – The College Board
Project Description: This is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Quill, a free, open-source digital platform that provides research-based writing instruction to students. Researchers from The College Board aimed to estimate the impact of Quill’s sentence-combining intervention on high school students’ paragraph revision skills as assessed immediately after receiving the intervention, as well as two weeks and two months post-test. The study included a sample of 82 students who were all at least 14 years old and whose parents provided active consent for them to participate. After recruiting students, the research team randomly assigned about half to participate in a four-week sentence-combining intervention with one week focused on appositive phrases, one week on participial phrases, one week on complex sentences, and one final week on a mix of appositive phrases, relative clauses, and participial phrases activities. Students in the control condition received filler activities involving proofreading, punctuation, and grammar. These activities were thought to be educationally enriching, though not directly related to target study outcomes. Students in both conditions practiced skills five times per week when participating in the intervention. The researchers used a series of whole-discourse exercises to assess students’ paragraph revision skills prior to the start of the four-week intervention, immediately after the intervention, and then two weeks and two months post-test. They then fit a series of regression models to estimate the impact of assignment to the sentence-combining intervention on students’ paragraph revision skills at each of these follow-up time points.
Key Findings: The researchers found large, positive, statistically significant impacts of Quill’s sentence-combining intervention on students’ paragraph revision skills measured immediately post-test. Follow-up analyses revealed that impacts were mostly sustained in magnitude at the two-week and two-month follow-up data collection time points.
Study Citation: Chang, B. & Lazowski, R. (2023). Effects of a Quill.org intervention on paragraph revision. College Board Report.
Full report here.
Research brief here.
The Key Findings above were reproduced from the published report and do not necessarily reflect interpretation of Overdeck Family Foundation staff.
