Precision Teaching can make children faster and more accurate at the small tasks they practise. What nobody has shown is that it makes them better writers. This article explains why, and where Precision Teaching might still be useful.
What is ‘precision teaching’?
Precision teaching is a way of practising a very specific skill until it becomes quick and automatic. The aim is to reach a target speed, such as a set number of correctly formed letters or correctly written sentences per minute.
For some things, this works well. Recalling times tables, learning which letters go with which sounds, and forming letters correctly are all clear-cut skills. Precision teaching has a reasonable track record with them. The trouble starts when the same approach is applied to writing as a whole.
The question that matters
When children are taught this way, does the quality of the writing they produce on their own get better? Plenty of classroom activities make children better at the activity itself. Far fewer make them better writers. Researchers call the first kind of improvement near transfer (getting better at things very much like what we just practised) and the second far transfer (using what was learnt in ‘real’ writing).
Problem 1: The evidence is thin
Most PT research follows a handful of children at a time, often just three or four, usually with special educational needs, taught individually or in small groups. These studies can show that something worked for those children. They cannot tell us whether it would work in an every day class of thirty.
The reviews that exist are small. One review of PT across all school subjects found 11 studies involving 170 children in total (Gist & Bulla, 2022). Another, of autistic children, found 13 studies and described the evidence as ‘rather small’ (Martinho et al., 2022). There are no large classroom trials of PT for writing, and it does not feature in the main guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation or the What Works Clearinghouse.
Problem 2: Writing isn’t a set of separate parts
PT assumes that writing can be broken down into small discounted pieces, each piece practised until it is fast, and the pieces are then added back together. That works for times tables. It doesn’t work for writing, where generating ideas, planning, building sentences, thinking about the reader, handwriting and spelling all happen at once or else affect each other.
A useful comparison is a musician. Pianists do practise scales, but someone who only ever practised scales couldn’t play a piece of music. The same goes for a footballer who only did sprints. Practice of the parts helps, but only alongside practice of the whole thing.
The research on handwriting and spelling shows exactly this. Teaching handwriting explicitly makes children’s handwriting neater and quicker (Santangelo & Graham, 2016). Teaching spelling improves the spelling in children’s own writing (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).
Problem 3: Fast isn’t the same as good
PT measures writing by counting: words per minute, or ‘correct word sequences’. These kinds of activities can tell you something about how fluently a child can get some words down onto paper. They tell you nothing about whether the writing makes sense, suits its reader, is well organised, or is any good!
A child can write lots of correct words quickly and still produce something that says nothing. In fact, writing fast without stopping to think is exactly what inexperienced writers already do. Researchers call this ‘knowledge telling’: writing down whatever comes to mind, in the order it comes (Young & Ferguson, 2022). Training children to write faster may make this habit worse, not better.
This is not a hypothetical concern. In the two clearest studies of PT for writing, the children practised writing simple sentences in one-minute bursts. Their sentences got quicker and more accurate but the researchers measured only correct words and complete sentences. Nobody looked at whether the writing was any good, and when the children went on to write short paragraphs, the improvement was patchy (Datchuk, Kubina & Mason, 2015, 2017). The researchers themselves said future studies should look at writing quality.
Problem 4: It leaves out what makes children want to write
Children write for reasons: to tell a story, persuade someone, share what they know, or make a friend laugh. Good writing depends on having something to say and someone to say it to. Children’s confidence and motivation also matter a great deal, both to how much they write and to how well.
PT has nothing to say about any of this. It cares only about speed and accuracy. None of the PT writing studies we looked at measured how children felt about writing. There is good reason to be cautious: research on extrinsic writing motivation shows that when children’s performance is constantly measured against targets set by others, their own interest in writing tends to drop (Young, 2024).
This matters most for children with special educational needs, who are the focus of most PT research. These children benefit most from learning how to generate ideas, plan, set writing goals, check their own manuscripts and keep going, alongside instruction in foundational writing skills (Young & Ferguson, 2024). Drills alone risk making them better at the drills without making them better writers.
Problem 5: It ignores what’s going on in children’s heads
PT comes from behaviourism, a tradition that focuses on what can be observed and counted, and sets aside thoughts, plans and intentions. But decades of writing research shows that what goes on in a writer’s head is exactly what makes the difference: having a goal, planning, keeping the reader in mind, and checking and revising as you go. Teaching children these things improves their writing (Young & Ferguson, 2022).
Problem 6: It can crowd out real writing development
Every minute of a writing lesson spent on timed drills is a minute not spent on teaching idea generation, planning, reading as a writer, drafting, revising, proof-reading and writing for a real reader. These are the things the evidence shows make children better writers. If drills replace these practices, children may end up worse off.
There’s also a risk of fooling ourselves. A child who practises writing ten correctly punctuated sentences a day will get better at writing ten correctly punctuated sentences a day. It’s easy to take that as evidence that their writing has improved. But when the same child sits down to write a story, they still need to conceptualise their writing intention, manage their ideas, translate their ideas into language, choose words, keep it all connected, transcribe it to paper, and think about their reader, none of which the drill practised.
Is there anything worth keeping?
Yes, in four areas:
- Handwriting. Slow, effortful handwriting gets in the way of writing, because it takes attention away from what the child wants to say. Short, regular checks on handwriting speed can help teachers spot children who are struggling. Clear handwriting teaching with brief, regular practice does make handwriting quicker and neater. Just don’t expect it, on its own, to make their writing better.
- Children with severe handwriting difficulties. For a small number of children with serious motor difficulties, intensive, PT-style handwriting practice may help, as long as it happens alongside proper writing teaching, not instead of it (for more on writing interventions, see this article).
- Spelling. Like handwriting, spelling benefits from short, regular practice with quick checks. Brief, frequent checks can show teachers which spelling patterns a child has secured and which need teaching again. With this said, children still need time and instruction in how to proof-read their own pieces for spelling (for more, see our eBook on teaching proof-reading).
- Keeping a closer eye on progress. PT is right that teachers should check children’s progress often. But checking alone isn’t enough. Studies where teachers simply track children’s progress make no real difference to their pupils’ writing. What helps most is feedback that children receive while writing and then act on it that day (Young & Ferguson, 2023).
An approach with a much stronger record is teaching children strategies for generating ideas, planning, drafting, revising and proof-reading, and helping them learn to use those strategies independently. Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), which shapes what we call ‘mini-lessons’, is the best-known example (a link for more on this). Its evidence is not perfect but it is much stronger than PT’s.
A sensible division of labour, then, is this: teach handwriting and spelling explicitly, using quick, regular checks where they help; and teach composition through strategy teaching within meaningful class writing projects (for more, see our Writing Map).
In summary
Precision teaching can make children faster and more accurate at the specific tasks they practise. That is near transfer. What the research has not shown is far transfer: that any of this makes children better writers when they write for themselves.
Schools would do better to teach handwriting and spelling clearly, give children plenty of meaningful writing to do, teach them how to generate ideas, plan, draft, revise and proofread, and give them high-quality feedback while they write.