The effect of educational technology usage on writing skills in 6th grade students

Azamtaheri, G.; Soolmaz, N.

doi:10.22061/tej.2025.11439.3148

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran

10.22061/tej.2025.11439.3148

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Writing skill as a way of exchanging information, expressing thoughts, feelings and communication is clearly compared to the past. This skill, as one of the basic skills in students' academic courses, plays a very important role in the transfer of their thoughts and ideas. Writing skill has a great impact both on the academic world and the professional life of students. The use of educational technology in improving writing skill in elementary school as an important issue is of particular importance due to the impact of technologies on teaching and learning process. Also, teaching writing skill in elementary school is the basis for the development of this skill in future academic courses. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of using educational technology on the writing skill of 6^th-grade students.
Methods: The present research method was semi-experimental with pre-test and post-test and control and experimental groups. The statistical population of research included the 6^th- grade students in the schools of the 14^th district in Tehran in academic year of 2023-2024, of which 60 students were selected via simple random sampling and were randomly divided into two groups of 30 students, experimental and control. The reliability of the researcher-made test was obtained 0.82 through Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Then, the pre-test of writing skill was administered in both groups. In the next stage, the experimental group received four 90-minute sessions of training on the use of educational technology in writing, and the control group did not receive any training with educational technology. Finally, the writing skill test was administered as a post-test for both groups. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS (Version 26) software and covariance analysis methods.
Findings: The findings of research showed that the use of educational technology was effective for the selection of writing topics, paragraph writing, and ability to produce coherent writing by observing the components, with educational technology coefficients of 86, 82 and 85, respectively. It means integration of educational technology not only cultivated students' ability to generate creative and relevant writing topics, but also strengthened their paragraphing and organizational skills. The interactive and engaging nature of the technology-driven environment encouraged students to develop inventive titles and equipped them with strategies to organize ideas and structure responses within a narrative framework. Furthermore, this structured approach facilitated an increased awareness among students of the logical flow required in writing, enhancing their overall coherence and creativity. In other words, findings showed that the use of educational technology in teaching writing had a direct relationship with development of students' writing skill, and using this method can be useful as an efficient tool to increase students' writing progress. With the use of educational technology, students could access information that was not available in classroom in the past. They also got different information about different writing topics and this information gave them different ideas to choose an interesting topic. In addition, they learned various points about how to write paragraphs to make the text more coherent. Finally, the use of educational technology led to reinforcement of what has been learned to become a real story.
Conclusion: The results indicated that the use of educational technology iwass effective in improving the writing skill of the 6^th- grade students. In other words, according to the results of examining the effectiveness of use of educational technology on the ability to choose the title, the ability to write paragraphs, and the ability to produce coherent writing, that are variables of the 6^th-grade writing skill. Regarding making the environment of teaching essay fun and enjoyable through educational technology, students tried to present creative titles. Also, with the use of educational technology, the learner realized how to ask themselves questions in a story and how and where in narrative to answer that question, and this issue was effective in strengthening student's paragraph writing. Finally, the use of educational technology made students creative and improved the quality of their writing skill; as a result, they obtained the ability to produce coherent essays. Since the use of educational technology had a significant effect on all three variables, it can be concluded that use of educational technology is generally effective in improving writing skills of the 6^th-grade students.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Educational Technology - Public education

COPYRIGHTS
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

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