The project “Functional Writing in Primary School” (FUS) aims to increase the quality of the teaching and learning of writing in the first years of schooling. The primary aim of the project is to investigate what effects an early start with functional writing might have on students’ ability to use writing as a tool for learning and communication within school subjects. Such an approach will be novel as it already from school year 1 combines writing for a variety of purposes in meaningful ways with learning of alphabetic codes. The main part of the FUS project will be organized as an experimental intervention project revolving around teachers’ professional learning and students’ classroom actions in writing instruction in school years 1 and 2. The expected outcomes of the project are evidence-based knowledge of effective writing instruction for young learners and descriptors of expected trajectories of writing development.

Multidisciplinary and international

The FUS project will be multidisciplinary. The research group will consist of researchers from the fields of applied linguistics, mother-tongue education, psychometrics, writing and literacy research, corpus linguistics, and the economics and management of education. Researchers from several disciplines will be able to shed light on the overarching research aim through different lenses, thus offering varied and complementary answers to what effects the project will have.

The FUS project will have international aspects. The project will include key researchers in Denmark and Sweden. These researchers will contribute in Stages 1 and 2 of the FUS project. They will participate in developing resources for instruction and assessment and will collect data in Denmark and Sweden. The international collaboration will provide a broad range of expertise and secure the possibility of comparing and contrasting results across different educational contexts. This will in turn provide robust knowledge about similarities and differences in the effectiveness of the resources. Such findings will be of great international interest and will strengthen the possibility to evaluate the external validity of the project.

Timeline