Adolescents’ Disciplinary Use of Evidence, Argumentative Strategies, and Organizational Structure in Writing About Historical Controversies

Abstract

This study considers how adolescents compose historical arguments, and it identifies theoretically grounded predictors of the quality of their essays. Using data from a larger study on the effects of a federally funded Teaching American History grant on student learning, we analyzed students' written responses to document-based questions at the 8th grade (n = 44) and the 11th (n = 47). We report how students use evidence (a hallmark of historical thinking), how students structure their historical arguments, and what kinds of argumentative strategies they use when writing about historical controversies. In general, better writers cite more evidence in their arguments than weaker writers, and older students demonstrate how to situate evidence in ways that are consistent with the discipline. Both the structure of students' arguments and their use of evidence were predictive of the overall quality of their essays. Finally, students' use of argumentation strategies revealed

Students' writing from sources for academic purposes: A synthesis of recent research

“…Apart from the multi-faceted teaching approaches and learning activities documented in these four studies, two specific instructional techniques have proved pedagogically successful. One approach includes various ways of prompting students to analyze sources profoundly and to construct arguments from or about the sources, either explicitly as a pedagogical intervention or implicitly through the progress of concerted academic studies (Chang, Sung, & Chen, 2002;De La Paz & Felton, 2010;De La Paz et al, 2012;Kirkpatrick & Klein, 2009;Klein & Samuels, 2010;McCarthy Young & Leinhardt, 1998;Reynolds & Perin, 2009;Wiley & Voss, 1999). The other, related technique is to help students evaluate the value and reliability of information sources through interactive learning questions or annotations on sources (Cerdan & Vidal-Abarca, 2008;Proske & Kapp, 2013;Wiley et al, 2009;Wolfe, 2002).…”

Source use and argumentation behavior in L1 and L2 writing: a within-writer comparison

“…For argumentative source-based essays, it is clear that, in addition to general writing skills and sufficient language proficiency (particularly in L2), students must acquire two types of domain-specific practices: argumentation or reasoning practices and source use practices (see Ferretti & Fan, 2016; see also De La Paz, Ferretti, Wissinger, Yee, & MacArthur, 2012). Potential ways to help students master these practices include permitting students to translate texts from L1 to L2 (e.g.…”

Teaching the Reasons Why: An Analysis of Causation in History Textbooks and Historical Primary Source Documents

“…The results demonstrate that the number and types of causal constructions vary between PSDs and the textbook passages. These differences contribute to the growing body of literature exploring considerations for apprenticing students in reading and writing history [e.g., [70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80] by verifying that the causal constructions between each text set vary by a significant amount. This difference means that students are not exposed to the same number of causal constructions while reading PSDs as they are when they read history textbooks.…”