Evaluating elementary-aged students' abilities to generalize and maintain fluency gains of a performance feedback writing intervention

National estimates of students' writing abilities in the United States indicate that in 2002, 72% of elementary-aged students were unable to write with grade-level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). Although performance feedback is one type of intervention that improves students' writing skills, no study to date has examined the generalization and maintenance of writing fluency improvements developed through these interventions. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether elementary- aged students assigned to a performance feedback intervention condition demonstrated evidence of greater immediate treatment effects, generalization, and maintenance than students assigned to a practice-only condition. Results revealed that in comparison with the practice-only condition (n = 52), students assigned to the performance feedback condition (n = 51) demonstrated significantly greater immediate and generalized writing fluency improvements. However, evidence of maintenance of intervention effects was limited. These findings suggest that, in isolation, performance feedback may produce short-term desired effects on students' writing fluency growth, but that explicit programming of generality may be required to produce long-term achievement gains.