Article Review 3

My third article review is The Effects of Computer Graphics Organizers on the Narrative Writing of Elementary School Students with Specific Learning Disabilities. I appreciate the specific nature of this study and found it quite interesting. The paper begins with basic information concerning difficulties with writing (and more specifically the process of writing) for people with specific learning disabilities (SLDs). The authors (Gonzalez-Leto, Barbetta, and Unzueta) were only able to find five prominent studies on this subject and only three of these included students with SLDs. Although all of these studies showed a positive (only based on attitude) or positive (quantitative) outcome of the use of computer based graphic organizers, I found the limited overall number of participants to be concerning. The largest group (24 students) was in the study which only presented data on the attitude of the students toward the writing process. The other two studies had 12 and 4 students, not a significant study group, in my opinion. I hoped that this study would be on a larger group, but only 4 students were included in this study. The study is detailed and appears to follow valid research techniques, including interobserver agreement testing, and uses a number of quantitative measures to determine increase quality of writing, I am also concerned about the limitations section of the study. This section notes that due to the limited typing abilities, the participants hand wrote their compositions instead of typing them while viewing the diagrams created by the computer graphic organizers. This says to me that the computer was not necessarily the reason for the positive outcome. Perhaps the provided outline (The outline appears to have a great deal of information in it,. I cannot determine from this paper which parts of the outline were pre-populated and which were filled out by a participant, but feel the sentence sections were pre-populated.) with its pre-populated questions, even in paper form, might have produced the same positive results.

I understand that this article is a peer-reviewed study. However, I wonder if the extremely limited number of students or the lack of typing ability (which affected the use of the computer, as intended) made the author's question the time and effort put into this study. I know I would have questioned the usefulness of the study.

Gonzalez-Ledo, M., Barbetta, P. b., & Unzueta, C. H. (2015). The Effects of Computer Graphic Organizers on the Narrative Writing of Elementary School Students with Specific Learning Disabilities. Journal of Special Education Technology, 30(1), 29-42.