Journal of the Learning SciencesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:As the call for adolescent literacy grows louder, attention must be paid to the particular demands of each discipline if educators are to help students develop advanced literacy skills. The hallmarks of advanced literacy are specific to different fields of study. This article proposes a descriptive framework for adolescents' historical writing. Qualitative analyses of 56 written responses to a document-based essay question by high school juniors are used to identify and illustrate trends in adolescents' use of evidence in their historical writing. These trends-referred to as characteristics of students' historical writing-include factual and interpretive accuracy, persuasiveness of evidence, sources of evidence, corroboration of evidence, and contextualization of evidence. This article identifies benchmarks and shares a range of student work samples for each characteristic. Defining the nature of historical writing provides a framework for integrating literacy and content and for exploring and developing advanced literacy skills through the particularities of subject-specific composition.

No abstract

This study explored the extent to which an 18‐day history and writing curriculum intervention, taught over the course of one year, helped culturally and academically diverse adolescents achieve important disciplinary literacy learning in history. Teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship form of instruction for the integration of historical reading and writing strategies and content learning with the goal of improving students' historical argument writing. The intervention had positive and significant results for each writing outcome. After controlling for variables associated with students' incoming abilities, the researchers found moderate to large effects for all participants. Relative to basic readers in the control condition, those participating in the intervention scored higher in historical writing and writing quality and wrote longer essays; these results translate into effect sizes of .45 on basic readers' historical writing, .32 on their overall writing quality, and .60 on the length of their papers. Teachers implemented the reading and writing curriculum intervention with high levels of implementation fidelity, leading the researchers to explore additional factors that contributed to students' success after accounting for teacher effectiveness. The results indicate further benefits dependent on the degree to which students completed the curriculum.

One path to improving adolescents' literacy skills is to integrate reading and writing into the content areas in which such work occurs. Although argumentative writing has been found to help students understand historical content and transform information, scholars do not know the influence of specific task structures on students' writing or historical reasoning. To learn more, the authors administered four document-based writing tasks on the origins of the Cold War to 101 students from 10th or 11th grade. Using multiple regression, the authors found that writing tasks explained 31% of the variance in the quality of students' overall historical reasoning after accounting for differences in students' background. A closer analysis of different aspects of historical reasoning using a different rubric (and as analyzed using MANOVA) indicated that students' skill in recognizing and reconciling historical perspectives significantly improved with writing tasks that asked them to engage in sourcing, corroboration, and causal analysis. The task that asked students to imagine themselves as historical agents and write in the first person was significantly different and resulted in the lowest mean essay scores.

Journal of the Learning SciencesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: