enlarging the data set, a researcher could determine any trend regarding students’ use of
vocabulary in their writing. It would also be interesting to see whether the same results
would be seen among students of different ages and intellectual abilities. The writing
prompts used in the study tended to be fictionalized and open-ended; it would be
interesting to investigate whether aligning prompts and vocabulary words more closely
would facilitate increased vocabulary usage. Most of the students were not motivated to
edit the prompts between drafts, so informing students that vocabulary words used in the
prompts would have an effect on their scores might change the outcome; this possibility
should also be investigated.