The overall goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of two different types of intervention aimed at improving written argumentative synthesis by integrating conflicting information from different sources. The participants were 114 undergraduate psychology students. Although the aims of both modalities were the same, the intervention with each group was different. More specifically, both interventions combined the use of a graphical guide that included critical questions with collaborative practice in pairs, but one of them also included explicit instruction in which the processes involved in performing the task were modelled and explained. Before and after the interventions, the students in both intervention groups produced syntheses while working individually without the help of the guide. The degree of integration of conflicting information in the individual products, the number of arguments selected from the sources and the students' perceptions of the utility of the intervention were assessed. The results indicate that only students who received additional explicit instruction showed an improved ability to integrate conflicting information and increased the number of arguments they selected from the sources. Furthermore, it was found that students in that group tended to perceive the utility of the intervention more positively than those in the other group.

Students' task representations are essential to understanding how they tackle writing tasks. The aim of this study was to explore a variable which may influence this representation: conceptions of writing. Different approaches have established two ways of conceiving writing: one which is more reproductive, the other more epistemic. In this study, secondary and university students' conceptions about several facets of writing were explored through a questionnaire. The results suggest that, although university students have a more sophisticated and complex conception of writing than secondary students, neither group has a fully epistemic conception. Furthermore, differences were found among the ways of conceiving the different aspects examined, especially in the secondary students group.

The research reported here employed a multiple-case study methodology to assess the online cognitive and metacognitive activities of 15-year-old secondary students as they read informational texts and wrote a new text in order to learn, and the relation of these activities to the written products they were asked to generate. To investigate the influence of the task, students were required to perform two different tasks which differed in complexity and familiarity. The first task was reading a single text and making a written summary of it, while the second consisted in reading two texts and making a written synthesis of them. To gather information about how students construct meaning from informational texts, we asked students to think aloud as they read and wrote in order to provide us with information about their comprehension and composition processes. We also examined their reading and writing activities during the tasks. The results show that to a large extent secondary school students lack the cognitive and metacognitive processes that would enable them to make strategic use of reading and writing. They also show that, although there are no major differences in the way secondary school students tackle these different tasks, those who create the most elaborate products evidence a more recursive and flexible use of reading and writing. The most obvious conclusion as far as the repercussions of these findings are concerned is that there is an urgent need for work on tasks of this kind in the classroom.

The aim of the study was to examine reading and writing tasks as learning tools in higher education in Spain. The participants were 171 undergraduates from three different university degree courses. The data were gathered through a questionnaire that explored the kind of tasks carried out by the students, their perception of different aspects of the tasks they perform, and the conditions in which they perform them. The article presents the most relevant differences found, taking into account the type of course being studied. The findings suggest that the most common tasks are still those aimed at knowledge reproduction. Nevertheless, students of history differ from students of psychology and biology in that they carry out some of the tasks requiring writing and discussing on the basis of reading multiple texts to a greater extent.

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: This study investigated the conceptions about writing and writing self-efficacy beliefs held by high school students in relation to the students' gender as well as their associations with writing achievement. The results show that female students have more sophisticated writing conceptions than their male counterparts but no gender differences were found in writing self-efficacy beliefs. In addition, results reveal that writing self-efficacy beliefs and gender play an important role in predicting writing performance and that writing performance is moderated by students' writing conceptions. Educational implications and further research are discussed.