“Sentence Combining at the College Level: An Experimental Study” by Max Morenburg, Donald Daiker, and Andrew Kerek

This research study attempts to discover whether students who are instructed in the practice of sentence combining (referred to as SC) have more developed writing skills than students trained in traditional composition practices. Although earlier studies discussed the use of SC in elementary and junior high composition classes, this study is the first of its kind to analyze its place in college level courses.

Hypotheses

It was hypothesized that an experimental group, trained in SC, would score significantly higher than a reference group on:

            1. syntactic maturity factors as measured by standard quantitative criteria

2. overall writing quality as judged by a panel of experienced college teachers of college composition

            3. reading ability as measured by a standard reading test

Design and Procedures

The design of the study was a pretest posttest format. The researchers strictly controlled factors such as the subject selection, teachers, assignment variables, and environment. They selected twelve sections of Miami University’s freshman English course for the study, which consisted of 290 students. Six sections were the control group and six sections were the experimental group. They selected students from the lower 80% of the freshman class and randomly assigned to the 12 sections with 26 students each. The teachers were selected carefully, with six being faculty members and six being graduate assistants. The assignments for the study included eight compositions written at the same point throughout the semester. The first and last compositions were especially important as they served as the pre and posttests. The researchers attempted to use two comparable topics for the pretest and posttest compositions (246).  The control sections followed traditional teaching methods at the university, and the experimental sections made SC activities the exclusive content of the course.

Measurement

The pretest and posttest compositions from both the control and experimental groups were measured for syntactic maturity and writing quality by three different rating systems, including holistic, analytic, and forced choice. The raters were 28 teachers of college composition with varying levels of experience and education. The rating criteria used included ideas, supporting details, organization and coherence, voice, sentence structure, and diction and usage.

Results

The results of the study proved that college freshmen trained in SC scored significantly higher than control students on the factors of syntactic maturity and quality, indicating that the first two hypotheses were accepted. The third hypotheses regarding reading ability was rejected. Although SC cannot transform students’ writing overnight, the study proves that its use in the classroom is superior to traditional methods.