It’s About Time! Lengthen Student Writing 

Our goal was to engage fourth-grade writers to write longer and more meaningful 
pieces of writing given the time set aside for writing.  Using a convenience 
sample with 17 fourth-grade students in two classes in a rural West Texas 
elementary school, we found that when given time as the constraint, children 
were better able to stay on task and, in fact, they wrote more than students 
that were constrained by length.