Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Learning and Individual Differences

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/lindif

Development of writing skills within a home-based, shared reading

intervention: Re-analyses of evidence from a randomized controlled trial
Simon Calmar Andersen a, *, Helena Skyt Nielsen b, Meredith L. Rowe c
a
Department of Political Science, TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research, Aarhus University, Bartholins alle 7, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
b
Department of Economics and Business, TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research, Aarhus University, Fuglesangs alle 4, 8210 Aarhus V, Denmark
c
Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, 14 Appian Way, 506 Larsen Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Achievement gaps in students' literacy skills by socioeconomic status (SES) are prevalent across the globe. Theory
Written narratives suggests that reading and writing skills rely on similar knowledge and cognitive processes, yet home-based
Parent reading interventions do not typically investigate effects on writing outcomes. Using a randomized controlled
Elementary school
trial, we examined the effect of a parent focused shared-reading intervention on writing skills of 1587 second-
Experiment
grade students in Denmark. Parents were provided with books and encouraged to have their children read with
them regularly. Children's writing skills at the word, sentence, and text levels were measured at the end of the
intervention. In addition to the previously reported effects on children's reading skills, the current analysis found
that the shared-reading intervention also had effects on the children's gains in writing skills at the sentence and
text levels. Initial gaps in writing skills based on maternal education and gender of the children were reduced by
the intervention.

1. Introduction beneficial for children from less-advantaged homes.

Achievement gaps in students' literacy skills by socioeconomic status
(SES) are prevalent across the globe and are reported to be increasing
(Chmielewski, 2019). Results from the 2018 Program for International
Student Assessment (PISA) of 15-year-olds indicates that in Denmark, a
country considered above average in reading ability and equity and
education, the average reading score is 501, yet there is still a 78-point
difference (0.78 SD) in scores for students from more versus less-
advantaged homes. As points of comparison, the United States has an
average score of 505, with an SES-gap of 99 points, whereas Hong Kong
has an average score of 524 with an SES-gap of just 59 points (OECD,
2019). While there is no international writing assessment with compa­
rable data, there is increasing evidence that significant within-country
SES-gaps in reading and writing skills are already robust at the begin­
ning of primary school (e.g., Kim et al., 2015; Reardon, 2013). These
socioeconomic disparities are thus evident early on, indicating an
important role of the home literacy environment in helping children to
develop literacy skills. However, few if any studies have examined
whether interventions targeting the home literacy environment affect
children's writing skills – and if so whether this would be especially
Shared reading interventions, where parents are encouraged to read
and talk about books with their children are typically focused on
preschool-aged children and have been found to improve children's
early language, emergent reading, and writing skills (Noble et al., 2019;
Zevenbergen & Whitehurst, 2003), which predict their later reading
skills in third grade (e.g., Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002). Whether shared-
reading interventions with primary school-aged children also improve
children's writing skills – and if so which types of writing skills – is to our
knowledge not yet examined. It is plausible that increased book reading
at home (by parent and child together) could help improve writing skills,
as reading and writing draw upon shared knowledge and cognitive
processes (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000), are found to be strongly
associated with one another (Proctor et al., 2020), and studies show that
school-based reading interventions are found to have effects on writing
(Graham et al., 2018).
1.1. Theory on knowledge shared by reading and writing processes
Fitzgerald and Shanahan (2000) suggest that reading and writing
both draw upon four forms of shared knowledge. Three of these may

* Corresponding author at: TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research, Centre for Integrated Register-based Research, CIRRAU, Department of Economics and
Business Economics, Denmark.
E-mail addresses: sca@ps.au.dk (S.C. Andersen), hnielsen@econ.au.dk (H.S. Nielsen), meredith_rowe@gse.harvard.edu (M.L. Rowe).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2022.102211
Received 2 November 2021; Received in revised form 23 August 2022; Accepted 29 August 2022
Available online 14 September 2022
1041-6080/© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
S.C. Andersen et al.
affect writing in a broad sense whereas the fourth may have more spe­
cific effects at different levels of text. First, “meta-knowledge” about
written language encompasses general knowledge about functions and
purposes of reading and writing, knowledge that readers and writers
interact, and ideas of one's own meaning making. Second, “procedural
knowledge” refers to knowing how to access, use, and generate knowl­
edge about reading and writing and about instantiating smooth inte­
gration of various processes. Third, “domain knowledge” relates to
substance and content of a specific domain which includes both prior
knowledge and content knowledge that is gained while reading and
writing.
The fourth type of knowledge in Fitzgerald and Shanahan's (2000)
model is “knowledge about text attributes”, which may analytically be
separated into knowledge at the word, sentence, and text levels. This
“levels of language” model, and its distinction between word, sentence,
and text levels is a well-established analytical tool in linguistics, even if
these three levels must be integrated in both the reading and the writing
process (Abbott et al., 2010, p. 281, Ahmed et al., 2014). At the word
level, Fitzgerald and Shanahan (2000) refer to graphophonics, or letter
and word identification and generation, phonological awareness, and
awareness of the shape of letters. We suggest that word-level knowledge
is used especially for decoding in the reading process, and for spelling in
the writing process. At the sentence-level is knowledge of syntax, or the
grammar of sentences and punctuations. This may benefit language
comprehension when listening to stories or reading and with sentence
construction when writing. Finally, knowledge about “text format” in­
cludes, according to Fitzgerald and Shanahan (2000), knowledge about
the syntax of larger chunks of text (e.g., story grammars and expository
text structures), and text organization (e.g., sequence of text). We sug­
gest that this may be especially relevant for text comprehension, when
listening or reading, and for genre composition and use of discourse
when writing.
The different types of shared knowledge and competences are
interlinked. According to the simple view of reading, decoding and
language comprehension are prerequisites for text comprehension (e.g.
Gough & Tunmer, 1986). And text comprehension, for instance estab­
lishing a pre-understanding of a book by looking at the title and the front
page, may help the process of decoding. Similarly, having an overall
understanding of the composition of the story that is about to be written,
may facilitate the writing of the first words and sentences. Indeed, many
types of evidence suggest that that there is a bidirectional relationship
between reading and writing (e.g., Shanahan, 2016).
1.2. Shared reading and its relationship with writing
A recent meta-analysis shows that reading interventions that
involved teaching students specific reading skills or having students
read or observe others interacting with text, had positive effects on
overall measures of writing as well as more specific measure of writing
quality and spelling (Graham et al., 2018). However, the studies rep­
resented in the meta-analysis by Graham et al. (2018) were school-based
studies where teachers or researchers conducted sessions with children,
and the reading activities often also targeted writing skills, such as in
studies in which students write a text, read and give feedback on each
other's text before they revise the text (e.g. Philippakos & MacArthur,
2016). Furthermore, the existing studies on the effect of reading in
school on writing skills have some limitations. For example, 27 of the 36
studies in Graham et al.'s (2018) meta-analysis used either a simple
measure of spelling as the outcome, or a composite measure of writing
quality. Few studies examined effects on multiple writing outcomes, and
none of those compare effects at the word, sentence, and text level (yet
see Knudson, 1991, which assessed some of these elements). Further­
more, sample sizes of these studies were small (3060 students in total
across the 36 studies, ranging from 28 to 220 students). The small
sample sizes not only make results uncertain, but limit the statistical
power needed to compare effects for students with different
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Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211
socioeconomic status.
As noted, studies on parent-focused shared-reading interventions are
mostly conducted with parents of preschool-aged children, and less is
known about whether these types of interventions can impact primary
school students' writing skills. A recent meta-analysis of shared-reading
interventions for children aged 7 years or younger shows positive effects
on language outcomes, including expressive vocabulary, receptive vo­
cabulary, phonological awareness, print concepts, and expressive lan­
guage (Noble et al., 2019). Few of these studies examine writing
outcomes, yet there is some evidence of effects on emergent writing
skills such as letter knowledge and print awareness (Zevenbergen &
Whitehurst, 2003). This suggests that a parent-focused shared-reading
intervention with older children in primary school could also potentially
have effects on more advanced writing outcomes.
Further, evidence from summer reading programs show that home-
based interventions can have a significant positive impact on chil­
dren's reading skills in the primary grades, and that effects tend to be
stronger for children from lower-income families (Kim et al., 2016; Kim
& Quinn, 2013). It is not clear, however, whether home-based reading
interventions might also affect children's writing skills. Writing does not
receive as much attention in literacy research as reading, yet writing is
challenging for students. In the U.S. context, only 27 % of 8th graders are
considered ‘proficient” writers on a National exam (U.S. Department of
Education et al., 2011). Thus, it is important to understand a variety of
ways to support students in their writing development, as writing skills
help promote learning across academic domains (Graham et al., 2020)
and is essential for many workforce roles.
1.3. The present study
In the present study, we ask whether a parent-focused shared-
reading intervention for second-graders in Denmark also has effects on
the student's growth in writing skills over the academic year. Further­
more, we ask whether the intervention closes part of the socio-
demographic gaps in writing skills. If the theory that reading and
writing draw upon shared knowledge and cognitive processes (Fitzger­
ald & Shanahan, 2000) is correct, we could expect that when parents and
their children read books together and talk about the books to gain
comprehension, they add to the knowledge base shared by reading and
writing. In this way, reading may have spill-over effects on writing, as
even though improved writing skills were not the aim of the reading
activities, the increased experience with shared reading at home may
help generate knowledge that has positive effects on writing skills.
As mentioned, one of the four types of shared knowledge that Fitz­
gerald and Shanahan (2000) argue underlie both reading and writing
relates to specific knowledge of text attributes which can be divided into
the word, sentence, and text level. If this theory is correct, we would
expect shared reading that focuses mostly on language and text
comprehension, for example parents and children talking about how to
understand specific sentences as well as the meaning of the whole text,
would affect writing skills at the sentence and text level more than the
word (spelling) level.
Furthermore, if the shared knowledge between reading and writing
is the driving mechanism behind spill-over effects from shared reading
on writing skills, we should expect that children with the weakest
knowledge base would be more affected by shared reading. Research
suggests that families with lower socioeconomic status are found to offer
sparser home learning environments for language and literacy devel­
opment, on average, compared to families of higher socioeconomic
status (Golinkoff et al., 2019), so we might expect children from these
families to benefit more from a shared reading intervention. Further,
there is a small yet significant gender gap favoring girls in literacy skills
at school entry (e.g., Chatterji, 2006; Entwisle et al., 2007). The reason
for the gender difference is not entirely clear, yet the parental invest­
ment environmental hypothesis (e.g., Baker & Milligan, 2016) has been
put forth based on evidence that parents read more with young girls than
S.C. Andersen et al.
boys. Thus, to the extent that boys' lower skills may be determined by
their early environments, an intervention of this sort may help to close
gender gaps as well.
In a previous study, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with
parents of second graders in Denmark. The treatment group in the trial
received an intervention that encouraged parents to have their child
read with them 15–20 min a day and instructions placed the most
emphasis on talking about the book and ensuring comprehension. The
intervention adopted a growth-mindset (Dweck, 2006) approach where
part of the intervention involved informing parents of the large impact
they could have on their children's literacy skills by reading with them
and encouraging them to read regularly. Indeed, in this study (Authors),
and in prior similarly designed intervention studies (e.g., Rowe & Leech,
2019), intervention effects were stronger for parents who had more of a
fixed than growth mindset. This suggests that informing parents about
the malleability of their children's skills and their own role in the process
is a particularly useful intervention approach for parents who believe
abilities are more fixed than malleable with effort. Further, results
showed that the intervention succeeded in increasing the reading skills
of the students by 0.26 of a standard deviation (p < 0.01) and with re­
sults at least as strong for children with immigrant parents or low-
educated mothers. Effects were strongest on text comprehension and
decoding skills and a little smaller on language comprehension. We also
found effects on writing skills at the sentence level (Andersen & Nielsen,
2016).
Here, drawing on the literature presented positing specific theoret­
ical relations between reading and writing skills, we use the data from
the trial to examine children's writing skills at the word, (sentence) and
text levels. Our specific research questions are as follows:
(1) Does maternal education, immigration status and gender predict
second graders' writing skills at the word, sentence and text level?
(2) Does a parent-focused shared-reading intervention have spill-
over effects to children's writing skills at the word, sentence,
and text level?
(3) Does the intervention affect writing skills of students with low-
educated mothers more than students with high-educated
mothers? And boys more than girls?
Data from the pre-test intervention assessment is used to study pre­
dictors of writing skills in Question 1, whereas Question 2 looks at ef­
fects of the shared-reading intervention on children's writing skills and
Question 3 tests differential socio-demographic effects from the post-test
data.
2. Methods
In this section we present materials and methods. First, we describe
the content of the shared-reading intervention. Then we present the
sample, the measures, and the statistical analysis.
2.1. Intervention
The intervention consisted of providing parents and their eight-year-
old children age-appropriate books together with a booklet and access to
an online video with advice for parents about how to read with their
children. Books included both fiction and non-fiction. With a limited
number of books provided, it would be impossible to match the reading
skill level of all students. Parents were therefore advised on how to find
additional books (for instance at the library) that would match the
reading skill level of their child. Importantly, the booklet and the video
did not give any advice on how to support children's writing skills –
neither about spelling (word level), sentence construction (sentence
level) or text composition or specific genre characteristics (text level).
Therefore, we could use it to test whether shared reading – without any
explicit focus on training in writing – spills over to improve writing
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Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211
skills.
The reading advice to parents primarily targeted reading skills at the
text level: The general approach in the booklet and online video was that
parents should talk with their children before, during and after they read
the book to “help your child understand the text”. The booklet and video
also contained some advice that targeted the sentence level by suggesting
that during reading parents could talk with their child about what the
words or phrases meant. In contrast, the booklet recommended that any
difficulties in decoding single words should not stand in the way of
enjoyable reading: “If there are words your child cannot read themselves
you can say the word's first letter/sound, let your child guess based upon
the context of the story and the pictures, read the word aloud for your
child. Do not correct your child if they read incorrectly unless it affects
their understanding of what has been read. If the text is too difficult to
read, you can read it aloud for your child”.1
The booklet and online video were translated into 10 languages
because a high share of families have immigrant background. Yet, the
supplied books were in Danish, as we wanted to make sure that immi­
grant families also had the best possible opportunities of supporting
their children's Danish reading skills. Families were encouraged to read
as often as possible and received information on how to find additional
reading material at the library, at the school, in the newspaper, etc.
However, the intervention did not request any fixed frequency. After 10
reading sessions, children could bring the logbooks to their school­
teacher, and the class would get a sticker. The class with the most
stickers received a prize. It was not mandatory for teachers to use the
logbook system; 13 of 36 classrooms in the treatment group made use of
the logbooks. According to the logbooks, parents read, on average, 89.2
times with their children from the time they received the materials in
October to the end of May. This corresponds to about 3 times per week in
about 30 weeks, which is more than average for this age group (Libraries
of the Future, 2017). Yet, it is important to note that the group that used
the logbook might differ from the group that did not use it; both because
the teachers and classrooms were a non-random sample and because the
students were affected by the nudge (the sticker) and thus perhaps read
more than those not using the logbook. Table S1 in the Supplementary
Material shows that boys are significantly over-represented in the group
using the logbook compared to girls, and there tend to be over-
representation of students with high-educated mothers compared to
low-educated mothers. Thus, the logbook data may be an upper bound
of the reading activities. Since the intervention did not request families
to read at any specific frequency, a specific measure of treatment fidelity
is difficult to calculate, but these figures suggest that treatment fidelity
was moderate.
2.2. Sample
We recruited 74 regular second grade classrooms (28 schools) in a
major city in Denmark and included all 1587 children attending those
classrooms. We employ no exclusion criteria, but we note that children
with immigrant backgrounds are only present in regular classrooms if
they have scored above a certain threshold in a mandatory language
screening test at school start. We use this particular test to stratify the
classrooms based on their average Danish language skills. We used the
average test score to rank-order the classrooms and create strata of four
classrooms each. Within each stratum two classrooms were randomly
assigned to treatment (n = 814) and two to control (n = 773). After the
randomization, two schools were merged reducing the number of
classrooms to 72 (without affecting the number of students). Finally,
444 students were lost to follow-up, leaving a final sample of 566 stu­
dents assigned to treatment and 577 students assigned to control.
1
The primary study examined the growth mindset approach, but since the
current study on the effects on writing is more exploratory, we focus on main
effects of the intervention.
S.C. Andersen et al.
Attrition was larger among immigrants and children of low-educated
mothers. However, attrition did not differ significantly between treat­
ment and control group (p = 0.52). See details in Fig. 1.
Participation was voluntary and the project is in accordance with
American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles of Psychologists
and Code of Conduct. When this research was carried out, no internal
review boards for social science existed in the country, and approval
from such institutions was not required. The project was approved by
the local government that implemented the intervention. Specifically,
the Danish Data Protection Agency approved the collection and treat­
ment of all data for the project (approval no. 2013-41-1793).
2.3. Measures
2.3.1. Measures of child and parent characteristics
Information on parents was obtained from administrative data linked
to the sample via the civil register system. The register data provided
detailed information on key variables such as parents' education,
country of origin and child gender.2 Parent's education is grouped in
compulsory education (i.e. primary and lower-secondary), vocational
training, high-school only, associate's degree, bachelor's degree and
master's or PhD degrees. For subgroup analyses, we categorized educa­
tion below the bachelor's level as “low education” and bachelor's, mas­
ter's and PhD degrees as “high education”.
Table 1 shows selected baseline characteristics and balance between
treatment and control groups (full set of characteristics in Table S2).
Students were on average 8.12 years old, 45 % of mothers had at least a
bachelor's degree and 21 % had an immigrant background.3 Information
on parents is missing for between 0 and 8 % of parents. The background
characteristics were balanced across groups except that the measure of
discourse writing skills (see below) was significantly lower at baseline
(pre-test) in the control group than in the treatment group. Therefore,
pre-test scores were important conditioning variables in the analyses
examining treatment effects.
2.3.2. Writing measures
Student writing data for the study were collected twice: in
August–December 2013 and in March–June 2014. The two data
collection waves included responses from 80.3 % of the students in the
fall (n = 1274) and 72.0 % of the students in the spring (n = 1143
students). Response rates were higher for girls (74 % versus 70 % for
boys), Danes (75 % versus 60 % for immigrants), and children of high-
educated mothers (78 % versus 68 % for low-educated). Children's
writing skills were elicited using two different writing prompts (one in
Fall and one in Spring), similar in structure and layout. Both writing
prompts consisted of four pictures, representing steps in a narrative
structure. The picture sequences involved the following elements:
Orientation (setting the scene), complication (two events linked), eval­
uation (of the characters), resolution (to the complication) (Martin &
Rose, 2008). One of the pictures was replaced with a question mark
allowing the student to make up his or her own twist of the plot at a
pivotal place in the story (see Fig. 2). The task was set to last no more
than 45 min and the teachers were instructed to hand out extra paper to
the students if needed.
The aim of the prompt was to elicit as elaborate narratives as possible
from the participating students. Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Material
shows the length of the texts written by students in both the pretest and
2
The reading score gaps are sizeable for these groups in Denmark: girl-boy
gap 0.2 SD, low-high education gap 0.5 SD and Danish-Immigrant gap
0.7–1.0 SD, according to Beuchert and Nandrup (2018) and Rangvid (2010).
3
With the exception of the share of immigrants, which is twice as high as the
national average, the sample is representative of the Danish population of
second graders. It is unsurprising that the share of immigrants is higher in a
major city compared to the country average.
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Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211
posttest. Mean number of words in the pretest was 62.7 (SD = 43.5).
Mean in posttest was 87.8 (SD = 51.5). The writing prompt and the
instructions were not pilot tested, as the task itself is very familiar to
both teachers and students. However, in a previously published study we
validated the writing measures (Andersen et al., 2018). Below we
summarize the five measures (details about the coding are reported in
Supplementary Material).
2.3.2.1. Word-level: spelling. We measured the students' spelling on a 4-
point scale. The lowest score (0) was assigned to text that showed no or
little phonological awareness, and the highest score (3) was assigned if
the students to some extent mastered not only morphological but also
orthographic features of Danish. Since this was a single item, we could
not compute a standard reliability score.
2.3.2.2. Sentence-level: microstructure wNAP. We adapted the Narrative
Assessment Protocol (NAP) coding procedure (Justice et al., 2010) to
written narratives in a score called wNAP. It consists of 12 items
including: sentence structure, phrase structure, use of modifiers and tier-
two verbs and nouns. For each of the 12 items we coded how frequently
a given NAP item occurred in the narrative with instances of three oc­
currences or above counting as “3” as in Justice et al. (2010). Only few
children scored maximum on all 12 items. The wNAP score was created
by summing the child's score on the 12 from 0 to 36. (Reliability: 0.95 in
pretest and 0.94 in posttest).
2.3.2.3. Text-level (I): narrative discourse. We measured narrative
discourse using four different items measured on 2- or 3-point scales.
Narrative discourse organizes meaning using language that represent
the past events and links them in time and/or cause. Mastering language
forms that represents a series of past events involves establishing tem­
poral distance between the here and now of the events in the narrative
and the communicative event itself (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Martin &
Rose, 2008). We examined temporal distance and cohesion in the
narrative with the first item. Linguistic features that create cohesion and
establish temporal and causal relations within text are important traits
of written discourse. We examined how the writers used pronouns (item
2) and conjunctions (item 3) to create and maintain cohesion between
phrases and sentences, and whether the events depicted in the pictures
in the writing prompt were represented in the texts (item 4). (Cronbach's
alpha is 0.61). Finally, we constructed an additive index with all four
items weighted equally. (Reliability: 0.76 in pretest and 0.68 in
posttest).
2.3.2.4. Text-level (II): narrative genre. We measured narrative genre
using four items to assess to what extent the students can compose a text
in the shape of a narrative: orientation, evaluation, complication and
resolution. These items were measured on 2- or 3-point scale. (Cron­
bach's alpha is 0.58). We constructed an additive index with all four
items weighted equally. (Reliability: 0.80 in pretest and 0.88 in
posttest).
2.3.2.5. Writing composite. A factor analysis based on polychoric cor­
relations between all items (spelling, wNAP, discourse and genre) shows
that the items tend to load on a single factor (see Table S3 in Supple­
mentary Material). We created a composite writing score based on the
factor loadings. This may be considered as a general writing quality
equivalent to what is used in many existing studies of writing (Graham
et al., 2018; see e.g. Lee & Schallert, 2016). The general writing quality
measure is highly correlated with wNAP (0.95–0.97; see Table S5 in
Supplementary Material).
Table S4 in the Supplementary Material presents descriptive statis­
tics on all writing measures, and Table S5 shows the correlation between
the writing measures. Before using the variables in the analyses, we
standardized them with a mean of 0 and a SD of 1 in order to make
S.C. Andersen et al. Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211

Enrollment
Signed up (n=74 classrooms,
1,587 students)

Stratification
Classrooms placed 2 classrooms placed
in 18 strata of 4 in stratum #19

6 classrooms 6 classrooms in
merged into 4 stratum #19

Allocation

Allocated to treatment group Allocated to control group

(n=36 classes, 814 students) (n=36 classes, 773 students)

Follow-Up

Lost to writing test Lost to writing test

analysis analysis
(n=248 students) (n=196 students)

Analysis

Analysed, writing test Analysed, writing test

(n=566 students) (n=577 students)

Fig. 1. Consort diagram.

results more comparable to other studies (also see Blinded for Review for
more detail). Fig. S2 shows the distribution of the measures. The genre
measure showed some level of ceiling effects, which may constrain the
estimated effect sizes for this measure. Additional analyses (not shown)
show that the ceiling effect on the genre measure is more pronounced for
girls and children of high-educated mothers, and to a lesser extent, for
girls on the discourse measure.
2.4. Statistical analysis
For our first research question, to examine pretest differences in
socio-demographic predictors of writing skills, we estimate the
following model by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS):
Wijk = α0 + X i α1 + uijk
where Wijk denotes writing skills for individual i in classroom j of stra­
tum k; Xi is a vector of covariates including child's score on pretest,
gender, immigration status, and mother's education; and uijk is an error
term. Standard errors are clustered at classroom level to allow writing
skills to be correlated within classrooms.
For our second research question, to determine effects of the reading
intervention on writing outcomes compared with treatment as usual in
the control group, we estimate the following model by OLS:
spring 2014 fall 2013
Wijk = β0 + β1 Tj + β2 Wijk + X i β3 + γk + εijk
where the post-intervention realization of writing skills has superscript
spring 2014, whereas the pre-intervention realizations have superscript
fall 2013; γ k is strata fixed effects and εijk is an error term. The parameter
of main interest is β1, which is the intention-to-treat effect. As a
robustness check we include an extended vector of covariates, Xi.
Finally, for the third research question, to test differential socio-
demographic intervention effects in post-test data, we use the interac­
tion between treatment and group indicators to test whether the

5
S.C. Andersen et al. Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211

Table 1 spelling, at the word level there is a substantial unfavorable gap of 21 %

Baseline characteristics and balance between treatment and control group. of a standard deviation for boys and 29 % for immigrants. For sentence-
Control group Treatment group Difference level and text-level writing skills, the gender gap doubles.
The associations between mother's education (six groups) and
Mean SD Mean SD p-value
writing skills differs across the four measures of writing skills: For
Child characteristics spelling and wNAP there is a general pattern that the higher education of
Boy 0.51 0.51 0.96
Age in 2013, years 8.12 0.36 8.12 0.35 0.84
mothers the higher skills the students have. For narrative discourse the
Immigrant 0.23 0.19 0.41 main gap is between students of mothers with only basic education or
Mother's education vocational training versus the remainder. For narrative genre, all levels
Vocational training 0.24 0.24 0.94 of education but vocational training are significantly positively associ­
High school only 0.07 0.09 0.40
ated with skills, but the pattern is mixed. For the composite measure
Associate's degree 0.04 0.04 0.47
Bachelor's degree 0.24 0.24 0.94 results are similar to wNAP. Tables S6-S10 show that when the back­
Master's or PhD degree 0.20 0.22 0.64 ground variables are added step-by-step in bivariate regressions, the
Writing measures (2013) coefficients for immigrant status and the education indicators are larger,
Word level: Spelling − 0.40 0.91 − 0.32 0.90 0.31 while the coefficients for the gender indicator are unchanged compared
Sentence level: wNAP − 0.46 0.89 − 0.31 0.85 0.16
Text level I: Discourse − 0.44 0.93 − 0.20 0.95 0.01
to the multivariate regression. Thus, it appears that the immigrant status
Text level II: Genre − 0.38 1.09 − 0.22 1.05 0.16 is strongly associated with education. The socio-demographic variables
Observations 773 814 1587 explain more of the variation in the wNAP measure (R2 = 17 %) than in
Note: All characteristics but child age and writing measures are from 2011.
the spelling measure (R2 = 7 %), which may be because the spelling
Standard errors are clustered at classroom level. Information on mother's edu­ measure is based on a single item with three values, whereas wNAP is
cation was missing for 64 individuals, whereas gender and immigration status based on 12 items ranging from 0 to 36.
was missing for less than five (exact number concealed to comply with data
protection rules).
3.2. Effects of a reading intervention on writing skills

Fig. 2. The strip used for generating written narratives.

Note: The word in the speech balloon, “MOR”, is Danish for “MOM”.

intervention (partly) closes the gap in writing skills between these
groups of students. In all analyses, standard errors (SEs) are clustered at
the classroom level to account for the hierarchical structure of the
dataset (children within classrooms).
Because of the exploratory purpose of this study, analyses are not
adjusted for multiple comparisons between subgroups. To account for
missing information on parents, we use the missing-indicator approach,
which (1) replaces missing values on each pretreatment covariate with a
fixed value, typically the mean, and (2) includes variables that indicates
whether participants have missing values on the covariate. This missing-
indicator approach gives unbiased estimates for randomized trials where
the distribution of covariates is balanced across treatment groups
(Groenwold et al., 2012; see also Gomila & Clark, 2020).
Table 3 indicates that the reading intervention did not improve
spelling skills. As found previously, it did improve writing skills at the
sentence level (wNAP)4 by 33 %. Furthermore, there were significant
positive effects on text level writing skills, specifically in discourse and
genre skills which increased by 29 and 37 % of a standard deviation,
respectively, as well as effects on the composite writing score which
increased by 35 % of a standard deviation. Thus, a shared-reading
intervention can have effects on improved writing skills, and the ef­
fects are selective to specific writing outcomes and not others. Table S11
in the Online Supplementary Material shows results of all the interaction
models (subgroup analyses) with covariates included. These sensitivity
analyses show that the results are robust but slightly weaker (no longer
significant for discourse).

3. Results 3.3. Differential socio-demographic intervention effects

In this section we present the empirical analyses needed to answer
the three research questions. In the first subsection, we examine whether
socio-demographic characteristics predict writing skills, and in the
second subsection, we investigate whether a parent reading intervention
has effects on children's writing skills and whether those effects differ
across socio-demographic groups.
3.1. Socio-demographic predictors of writing skills
Table 2 shows predictors of the four measures of writing skills. For
The third question was whether the intervention affected the writing
skills of children with low-educated mothers more than it affected those
with high-educated mothers, and boys more than girls. Table 3 shows
that students of low-educated (i.e. less than bachelor's level) benefitted
4
Results for wNAP are presented earlier by Andersen & Nielsen (2016), but
included here for comparison. Some variables have missing information. Minor
changes in the inclusion of these covariates means that results presented in this
paper are slightly different from results presented in Andersen & Nielsen
(2016).

6
S.C. Andersen et al. Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211

Table 2 the most from the treatment in terms of writing skills at sentence level
Socio-demographic predictors of writing skills (baseline).+ (wNAP) as well as both discourse and genre at the text level. The pattern
Word Sentence Text level Text level Composite of the coefficients is unambiguous and the gaps are sizeable (ranging
level: level: I: II: Genre factor score from 4 percentage points for spelling to 28 for genre), but only one of the
Spelling wNAP Discourse interaction effects are statistically significant. There is no difference
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) across immigrant status. The treatment effects are equally large and
Boy − 0.214** − 0.431** − 0.379** − 0.419** − 0.460**
statistically significant for Danish and immigrant children. Table 3 also
(0.0514) (0.0459) (0.0514) (0.0576) (0.0480) shows that boys benefited greatly from the intervention and effects are
Immigrant − 0.294** − 0.319** − 0.340** − 0.273* − 0.362** as high as 40, 42 and 59 % for wNAP, Discourse and Genre. The gender
(Danish is (0.0891) (0.0745) (0.0756) (0.132) (0.0896) gap for Genre is statistically significant, while the others are not. The
reference)
findings thereby demonstrated that for some of the writing outcomes the
intervention particularly benefitted children of low-educated mothers
Mother's education level and boys, even though we note that ceiling effects in the genre measure
Compulsory (ref.) (ref.) (ref.) (ref.) (ref.)
education
may contribute to this difference.
Vocational 0.0406 0.120 0.122 0.176 0.160
training (0.0788) (0.0808) (0.0983) (0.131) (0.0992) 4. Discussion
High school 0.138 0.275** 0.337** 0.278* 0.354**
only (0.123) (0.0898) (0.122) (0.127) (0.101)
Associate's 0.235 0.404** 0.426** 0.629** 0.482**
The current study adds to the literature by showing that a parent-
degree (0.161) (0.140) (0.140) (0.178) (0.153) focused shared book reading intervention with second-graders can
Bachelor's 0.205* 0.414** 0.392** 0.474** 0.452** have spill-over effects on the children's growth in sentence-level and
degree (0.0870) (0.0827) (0.0904) (0.131) (0.0900) text-level writing skills over the academic year. Further, we found sig­
Master's or 0.405** 0.602** 0.468** 0.677** 0.629**
nificant differences in children's writing skills on all four of the writing
PhD (0.0861) (0.0868) (0.0902) (0.132) (0.0951)
degree measures in the beginning of second grade across immigration status
R-squared 0.070 0.167 0.117 0.115 0.168 and maternal education. Importantly, the intervention effects on writing
tended to be stronger for children from low maternal education house­
Note: Table shows coefficients from OLS regressions. Dependent variables are
standardized measures of writing skills (fall 2013). Indicators for missing values holds, thus reducing some of the early achievement gaps evident in
are included. N = 1274. Standard errors are clustered at classroom level. writing skills. Furthermore, we found a significant disadvantage for boys
**
p < 0.01. in writing skills, and again, the intervention effects tended to be stronger
*
p < 0.05. for boys than girls. We discuss our findings and highlight the theoretical
+
p < 0.1. and practical importance of these findings below.
The finding that a parent-focused shared-reading intervention with
second graders can have effects on writing skills is novel and important.
Theoretically, the overall pattern of results is consistent with a

Table 3
Effect of reading intervention on writing skills.
Sample Word level: Sentence level: Text level I: Text level II: Composite

Spelling wNAP Discourse Genre Factor score

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

All children (N = 1143) 0.11 0.33** 0.29** 0.37** 0.35**

(0.084) (0.11) (0.1) (0.11) (0.11)

Socio-demographic subgroups
Danish background (N = 942) 0.11 0.28* 0.25* 0.34** 0.30*
(0.087) (0.12) (0.11) (0.099) (0.11)
Immigrant background (N = 201) − 0.079 0.30* 0.25+ 0.35 0.31*
(0.17) (0.13) (0.15) (0.22) (0.15)
Mother high education (N = 534) 0.083 0.26* 0.26* 0.24* 0.28*
(0.092) (0.13) (0.12) (0.12) (0.13)
Mother low education (N = 569) 0.12 0.39** 0.33** 0.51** 0.41**
(0.12) (0.11) (0.13) (0.13) (0.12)
Girl (N = 578) 0.059 0.31* 0.21 0.20* 0.29*
(0.1) (0.13) (0.12) (0.088) (0.12)
Boy (N = 565) 0.18 0.40** 0.42** 0.59** 0.46**
(0.11) (0.12) (0.11) (0.16) (0.13)

Interaction significance tests

Danish_background X treatment 0.19 − 0.019 − 0.0024 − 0.013 − 0.0063
(N = 1143) (0.18) (0.14) (0.16) (0.21) (0.15)
Mother_high_education X treatment − 0.039 − 0.13 − 0.079 − 0.28+ − 0.13
(N = 1103) (0.13) (0.12) (0.14) (0.14) (0.12)
Girl X treatment − 0.12 − 0.094 − 0.21 − 0.38** − 0.17
(N = 1143) (0.12) (0.11) (0.13) (0.14) (0.12)

Note: Table shows treatment effects of reading intervention on writing skills. Dependent variables are standardized measures of writing skills (spring 2014). OLS
regressions include a pre-test measure of the relevant writing skill (fall 2013). Standard errors are clustered at classroom level.
**
p < 0.01.
*
p < 0.05.
+
p < 0.1.

7
S.C. Andersen et al.
bidirectional account of reading and writing development (e.g., Sha­
nahan, 2016), and builds on previous findings from school-based
reading interventions that have effects on writing skills (e.g., Graham
et al., 2018), by showing similar effects in a parent-based shared-reading
intervention. Specifically, the primary focus of the current intervention
was comprehension and the significant effects on writing were on sen­
tence and text level writing quality (not spelling). Thus, for the current
findings, the increase in shared reading experience itself, may have had
a direct effect on writing skills through providing children with
increased opportunity to engage in the cognitive process of extracting
and constructing meaning through interaction with written language.
More specifically, the emphasis on comprehension encouraged a focus
on meta-knowledge (e.g., Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000), and on dis­
cussing what they were reading, potentially leading children to formu­
late sentences to explain their understanding of text, a practice that may
have supported children's ability to draw on procedural knowledge to
write brief stories as in the context of our writing assessment.
The null finding on spelling skills is slightly more perplexing since
the reading intervention did affect the students' decoding skills (blinded
for review) and shared knowledge theory would predict that if there was
an effect on decoding there might also be a spill-over effect on spelling.
However, the results in the meta-analysis by Graham et al. (2018) imply
that an effect on spelling would have been more likely if the intervention
itself had a more multi-faceted focus and a focus on phonological
awareness or phonics (Graham et al., 2018). Thus, while a strength of
the current study is that we went beyond global measures of writing to
examine effects at different levels, one limitation is that we cannot
determine why there was an effect on decoding in the reading analysis
(blinded for review), but not on spelling in this writing analysis. It may
be that the nature of the treatment in its focus on text level skills and
comprehension provided enough practice with text to improve decoding
skills, yet not to carry over to improving spelling which could arguably
require more explicit emphasis on phonics (e.g., Graham et al., 2018). It
may also be that the spelling measure was not necessarily sensitive to the
intervention. Recall, this was not a spelling test per-se, but a spelling
accuracy measure derived from the words children chose to spell on
their own in their writing, which may have introduced some noise into
the measure, as children could avoid using words they do not know how
to spell.
There are also clear practical implications from this study worth
discussing. The fact that the parent-focused reading intervention not
only showed main effects on writing skills, but reduced gaps in writing
skills by maternal education and gender is noteworthy. Indeed, in this
sample we replicated previous research showing gaps in writing skills
across socioeconomic status and gender (e.g., Kim et al., 2015; Reilly
et al., 2019). Previous research has identified the home literacy envi­
ronment as one potential source of these gaps (e.g., Baker & Milligan,
2016; Golinkoff et al., 2019). The current parent-focused intervention
that encouraged parents to have their children read with them on a
regular basis, may have potentially changed the home environment
more for lower-educated families and for families with boys resulting in
larger intervention effects. We can speculate as to why this might be the
case. In terms of education level, it is plausible that the families with
lower education, on average, were not aware that shared reading with
children could be so influential in their children's skills and that
providing them with this parenting knowledge had a stronger influence
on their home literacy activities than for higher-educated parents who
might already be engaging in shared reading more regularly. Indeed,
parenting knowledge of child development is found to mediate effects
between parental education and the home language and literacy envi­
ronment (Rowe, 2008; Rowe et al., 2016). If this mechanism is correct,
our results emphasize the importance of parent-focused interventions in
addition to classroom interventions, as even beyond early childhood,
shared reading with parents can positively impact reading and writing
development.
The finding about gender implies that parents might typically engage
8
Learning and Individual Differences 99 (2022) 102211
in more shared reading with girls than boys, and that encouraging
parents to read with boys resulted in a greater change in the home lit­
eracy environment for boys than girls. This hypothesis is supported by
literature showing that parents and teachers report that during early
childhood girls show more interest and enjoyment in literacy activities
including reading than boys do (Baroody & Diamond, 2013), girls tend
to have better self-perceptions of themselves as readers than boys (e.g.,
Lynch, 2002), and girls consistently out-perform boys on standardized
measures of reading achievement (see Lietz, 2006 for a meta-analysis).
While we cannot be certain that the gender effects are a result of envi­
ronmental rather than biological differences, environmental effects of
shared reading on reading (and now writing) achievement are clear.
Therefore, parent-focused interventions might be particularly important
for parents of boys, who may be less interested in or confident about
reading at home compared to their female peers. The extent to which
children enjoy reading is found to explain a significant amount of the
gender difference in literacy achievement (Chiu & McBride-Chang,
2006), therefore encouraging parents to read with boys might boost
their enjoyment and skills, ultimately reducing gender gaps in reading
and writing. We encourage further research that tests out some of these
potential mechanisms of our education and gender findings.
There are some limitations to the study worth mentioning, several of
which also pertain to the measures used. First, while students and par­
ents were reading both fiction and non-fiction at home during the
intervention, both the writing prompt test and the text-level measures of
writing skills were assessments of narrative genre writing. Indeed, in the
early grades, most writing activities in school focus on narrative writing
rather than expository writing (Cutler & Graham, 2008), thus we chose
measures the students were familiar with and could be successful on but
would also elicit variation. However, the genre measure in particular
showed ceiling effects and did not capture variation in the sample as
well as the other writing measures, suggesting that these eight-year-olds,
especially girls and children of high-educated mothers, had already
mastered the necessary components of narrative genre. As a conse­
quence, this may be part of the explanation for why the reading inter­
vention reduced the gender and the high/low-education gap in writing
as measured by narrative genre, as boys and the children of low-
educated mothers started out lower on this measure. Thus, this partic­
ular result must therefore be interpreted with caution. Further, re­
lationships between reading and writing may be stronger within versus
across genre, and other genres are indeed found to elicit more sophis­
ticated syntax (Beers & Nagy, 2011). Future work could include
different types of writing prompts and examine relations between
reading and writing within versus across genre. Another potential lim­
itation is that we only included measures of writing composition at
different levels and did not include measures of other aspects of writing,
such as handwriting, which are also developing during this time.
Future studies should be designed to specifically test for different
effects across subgroups. We note that even if attrition did not differ
across treatment and control groups, more immigrants and children of
low-educated mothers were lost to follow-up. To improve the exami­
nation of moderators, and with respect to children's reading levels,
future research should aim at reducing drop-out, collect more data on
the implementation of the intervention, and aim at reducing ceiling
effects in the writing measures.
While we did not collect a measure of treatment dosage, or how
much shared book-reading the families actually engaged in, we did
observe logbook usage in treated classrooms. If we take this as a proxy
for treatment dosage, it appears that treatment dosage was significantly
higher in families with boys, who also show higher treatment effects.
Thus, it could be that the greater effect of the intervention for boys was
due to differences in treatment, however we do not have full data to
examine treatment effects.
Despite these important limitations, the results have several practical
implications. First, practitioners should help parents understand that
reading together at home helps promote their children's reading and
S.C. Andersen et al.
writing skills. Conveying this information to lower-educated parents and
to parents of boys in particular and providing them with opportunities to
read together at home can help reduce income and gender-based
achievement gaps in literacy skills broadly speaking. These findings
should also be relevant for promoting summer reading programs, as
children are found to lose writing skills during the summer, in addition
to reading skills (Meyer et al., 2020), and the current findings suggest
that summer reading interventions (e.g., Kim & Quinn, 2013) could also
have effects on children's writing skills. Finally, key components of the
current intervention included providing parents with information about
how to engage in shared reading with their children, providing lower-
educated parents with the means to access age-appropriate books for
this purpose, and encouraging a growth-mindset in parents towards
their children's literacy. This approach is cost-effective and may be a
nice complement to school-based interventions. Future research should
examine the longer-term effects of parent-focused shared reading
interventions.
5. Conclusions
The current findings that a parent-focused reading intervention with
second graders also has effects on growth in writing for the students over
the course of the year is new and has several important theoretical and
practical implications. Theoretically, we add causal evidence to a
growing literature showing relations between reading and writing
development. More specifically, our nuanced measures of writing
enabled us to see that this particular intervention had effects, not on the
word level of writing (spelling), but on the sentence and text level
measures of writing, suggesting that for a reading intervention to have
spill-over effects on spelling as well there may need to be more of a focus
on phonology in the intervention. More practically, these results expand
our horizon of successful interventions beyond the classroom environ­
ment (e.g., Graham et al., 2018) to the homes of primary school chil­
dren. This is important, because often parent-focused interventions are
limited to the preschool years or to summer only. Finally, we show that a
parent-based reading intervention can reduce education- and gender-
gaps in writing skills that are evident early on in schooling. This is
important because these gaps tend to grow over time, not shrink,
therefore policies and programs that involve parents early and often
show promise as a profound way to improve not only reading but
writing skills for all children.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare no conflicting interests.
Acknowledgements
This project was financially supported by TrygFonden. TrygFonden
had no involvement in the decisions relating to the research reported
here.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary material to this article can be found online at https
://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2022.102211.
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