One of the most difficult and important academics abilities for children is writing (De la Paz y Graham, 2002). Students who have problems to compose texts will have disadvantage if we compared them with the rest of students. Firstly, this inequality is explained through the utility of writing to get the learning objectives purposed in the academic curriculum (Graham, 2006). On the other hand, writing is used by teachers to assess other skills that do not appear in academic curriculum (Graham y Perin, 2006). Despite its importance, the written production has received limited attention in research works in comparison with reading comprehension. So, there are little techniques of assessment of writing skills (Cuetos, Ramos & Ruano, 2002) and there are less research works about gender differences in the prevalence of writing problems (Berninger y Fuller, 1992). For this reason, we are interested in studied the gender differences in writing composition.

We can specifically look at a few previous studies on the gender differences in Primary students' writing tasks. Yan et al. (2012) developed a rubric made up of seven different criteria (with four levels of execution) for assessing the quality of a text. Relevance, breadth, depth in the elaboration of ideas, cohesion, coherence, and text structure and intelligibility were specifically evaluated. The results showed gender differences in textual quality, in favour of the girls. Also, we know that girls are better than boys on measures of skills related with writing, likes planning processes (Bardos, Naglieri y Prewett, 1992). However, gender differences in the ability to reflect or self-regulate when writing have not been demonstrated (Ramos, Cuadrado, & Iglesias, 2005). Berninger y Fuller (1992) researched about gender differences in orthographic, verbal and compositional fluency. In this research participated 300 children (150 boys and 150 girls). The researchers obtained that boys were significantly better than girls on oral fluency and girls were better than boys on written orthographic fluency and number of words. However, there are more aspects to assess in narrative texts like vocabulary, sentences and content of the parts of the story. This is one of our research purposes.

Gender differences in writing abilities have also been examined through a comparison between students who have different ages. A study showed that boys had a lower level than that of girls on writing skills in the primary grade (Berninger & Fuller, 1992). Also, we know that these results exist in junior high (Berninger, Whitaker, Feng, Swanson, & Abbott, 1996). Gender differences in the ability to self-regulate have been seen in students who have different ages, where an upward trend in said ability exists as the student's school grade level increases (Graham & Harris, 2000). However, Herbert y Stipek (2005) observed that findings for writing skills related with ages are inconsistent. In the framework reviewed when gender differences were found in writing skills, they favored girls. But there are some works researches that have found gender differences in first grade, others in late elementary schools, a few others in high school. So, we want to know when these differences appear.

Objectives

In this theoretical framework, the main objective of the present research is to gain information on the differences gender on various aspects related with the quality of a narrative text in a Spanish writing class. As we have remarked, only a small number of studies have been done about writing if we compare with reading. Additionally, we want to know if gender differences in writing quality exist from Primary Education. The obtained results serve as basis to develop a tool for improve the problems related with creative writing.

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