What's the evidence?   

To date, over twenty studies using SRSD have been published. SRSD has made significant and meaningful differences in children's development of a variety of planning and revising strategies. Writing strategies have been developed, typically with the assistance of teachers and students, for a variety of genres, such as narratives, story writing, persuasive essays, report writing, and so on. SRSD leads to improvements in four main aspects of students' performance: quality of writing, knowledge of writing, approach to writing, and self- efficacy. The quality, length and structure of students' compositions have improved; depending on the strategy taught, improvements have also been documented in planning, revising, substantive content, and mechanical concerns. These improvements have occurred among normally achieving students as well as students with learning problems, although most normally achieving students do not need as much time or extensive support in learning the self-regulation and writing strategies. SRSD in writing is not, however, a complete writing program. We do not recommend a prescribed sequence for teaching these composition and self-regulation strategies, nor arrange them from most to least critical. Rather, we believe that teachers, or teachers and their students together, should decide what strategies to develop at what time and with whom. Writing strategies instruction should be an important part of the overall writing program, and preferably, taught within the context of a writers' workshop or process writing approach. 

On the MLRC Website SRSD involves six basic stages of instruction (although they are not necessarily completed in order and can be recursive): 
1. developing and activating background knowledge, 
2. discussing the strategy - benefits and expectations, 
3. cognitive modeling of the strategy, 
4. memorization of the strategy, 
5. collaborative support of the strategy, and 
6. independent performance. 
Four basic strategies for self-regulation
- goal setting, self-instructions, self- monitoring, and self-reinforcement - are developed along with the writing strategies. 

On this website are the detailed lesson plans for teaching the self-regulated use of writing strategies for story writing (the W-W-W strategy) and early opinion essays (the TREE strategy) as well as support materials developed for 2nd and 3rd graders.  Both of these strategies were taught in conjunction with a simple planning strategy (POW). These lesson plans contain all of the components and stages of instruction that compose SRSD. Teachers can adapt these stages and components as appropriate to their students needs and capabilities. Some teachers might use the full model stage by stage in their classrooms, while others may combine, reorder, or delete some stages or components. However, when students are experiencing severe difficulties with or disabilities in writing, we recommend that all of the stages and components be used - as research has clearly shown that only when students are given all of the time and support they need to progress through all of the stages and learn all of the components, do the strongest benefits occur. 

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