The act of writing requires different operations, which occur simultaneously (Cassany, 1999; Hayes, 2006). These operations are not only related to textual editing processes specific to writing, also need skills of planning and revising, both involving high levels of self-regulation (Castelló, 2002). Students who could be considered as good writers have fewer mistakes in their texts (Ferrari, Bouffard & Rainville, 1998). If Primary Education students do not have the requirements to get each of the processes involved in writing skill, they will have problems when they write a text. As an example, some students could not know the gender structure of the text; others could have problems with creativity or coherently organization of a text. In addition, they could have difficulties with grammar, spelling, vocabulary or syntactic constructions. However, some kinds of texts, like short story, are easier to write.  For this reason, it has been selected for this research. Narrations are easy to write because they are related to the writers' previous cognitive structures (Graesser et al., 1994) and they have an episodic nature (Singer, Harkness & Stewart, 1997). This simple writing process could benefit to the quality of the texts. However, when a person write a text is not just enough to know the structure of a text genre is also necessary to consider spelling (Jimenez & Muñetón, 2002). Others authors believe it is important to evaluate other aspects such as grammar and text structure (Cassany, 1999). The criteria for assessing a creative text must be different to those used to evaluate other types of text, as elements to write are also different (Morales, 2004).

Several authors have created proposals for assessing narrative texts, as PROESC proposed by Cuetos, Ramos & Ruano (2002) or the rubric for assessing narrative texts proposed by Montanero, Lucero & Fernandez (2014). Benítez (2008) created a tool to assess short stories through a group of criteria like theme, characters, context of the story, plot and other linguistic aspects (grammar, vocabulary...). Ochoa-Angrino et al. (2008) created a planning and evaluation tool for writing stories. Other authors developed a rubric formed by seven different criteria (with four levels of assessment) to evaluate the quality of a text (Yan et al., 2012). The results of this research showed that the girls were significantly better than boys in text quality. This trend related to gender has been observed in other studies realized in Primary Education (Berninger & Fuller, 1992) and in Secondary Education (Berninger, Whitaker, Feng, Swanson & Abbott, 1996). Berninger & Fuller (1992) researched gender differences in oral and written fluency. In this study, participated 300 children (150 boys and 150 girls). The results showed that boys were significantly better than girls in oral fluency and girls were better than boys in written fluency. However, there are more aspects to be consider when we assess a short story, as the organizational aspects of a narrative text.

OBJECTIVES

In this framework about written texts production, it has been found differences in the composition of stories based on gender; some researchers found them in Primary Education, while others have obtained these differences since Secondary Education. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to explore if there are quality differences between narrative texts written by boys and girls who are studying Primary Education. If there are differences based on gender, we want to know in which aspects boys and girls are different.

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