Synthesis writing Teaching high school students how to read, plan, draft, and revise

Thanks to modern media, information sources are becoming more numerous and more accessible. One of the greatest challenges educators currently face is teaching students how to find reliable sources, and then analyze and process them. The synthesis writing task is a task in which all these skills come together and can be practiced. A synthesis text is a text that integrates different information sources. This dissertation investigates whether unit that teaches students how to write synthesis texts, while taking different writing routines into account, improves the quality of ninth-grade pre-university students' synthesis texts, regardless of their preferred routine.
This dissertation encompasses five studies. The first study describes a systematic literature review that yielded two instructional design principles. The second study reports on the systematic design and evaluation process of the unit. The third study describes the effects of a single component of the design: an animated three-minute video aimed at promoting the integration of source information. The fourth study reports on the effectiveness of the first and the redesign of the instructional units. The last study investigates the effects of a one-hour assessment training session for students.
Results show that the analysis of proven effective interventions can be a good starting point for the design of a learning unit, and that a systematic evaluation of a prototype can provide valuable information for its redesign, which ultimately realized the research goal: the effect of the unit was no longer moderated by writing routine.