An investigation into the effect of the story circle method on fourth grade primary school students' writing skills, writing motivation, and writing style

This study examined the effects of the Story Circle method on fourth-grade primary school students' writing skills, writing motivation, and writing styles. A quasi-experimental design was employed. The research was conducted with 31 students from two different fourth-grade classrooms in a private primary school in Ankara. To determine the equivalence of students' academic levels, a placement test was administered. As no significant difference was found between the groups based on the test results, the classes were randomly assigned as experimental and control groups. Both groups were given a pre-test, in which they were asked to write a story based on a theme of their choice from those included in the Turkish language curriculum developed by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE).While 14 students in the experimental group participated in writing activities based on the Story Circle method for five weeks, no intervention was applied to the 17 students in the control group. At the end of the implementation process, a post-test was administered, in which students were again asked to write a story based on a self-selected theme from the MoNE curriculum. To evaluate the writing skills and writing styles of the stories written in the pre- and post-tests, the 6+1 Trait Analytical Writing and Assessment Rubric (Özkara, 2007) was used. To assess writing motivation, the Writing Motivation Scale developed by Öztürk (2013) was applied. The collected data were analyzed using an independent samples t-test via the SPSS 24 software package. The results revealed that the Story Circle method had a significant and positive effect on the writing skills, writing motivation, and writing styles of fourth-grade primary school students.