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Online Clustering to Improve IB Students’ Writing: A Mixed Design Study

Abstract:

This action research study with analysis of quantitative and qualitative data aimed at applying the online clustering strategy to enhance students’ writing skills and text quality. Twenty young students between fifteen and sixteen years old participated in this study. They belonged to the Diploma Program of the International Baccalaureate from a public high school in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Most of them were at A1 and A2 level. The instruments applied for the study were a pretest and posttest, rubrics for scoring the written assignment, and a questionnaire. The findings disclosed that the participants wrote better texts because of the prewriting strategy. Significant variations in the pretest and posttest indicated that online clustering strategy had a positive impact on the students’ writing achievement. A t-test was used to determine the mean scores between the pretest and posttest. The difference in means is statistically significant at the <0.05 level. On the other hand, the effect size obtained was d = 1.8, which is a large effect size. Regarding students’ perspectives, results disclosed that most of the students had positive perceptions of clustering prewriting strategy to improve their writing skills. The findings might have implications for EFL researchers, teachers, and learners.