Think twice Literature lessons that matter

The aim of this dissertation is to provide literature teachers with the pedagogical building blocks (in terms of what to teach and how to teach it) for fostering their students’ critical thinking in literature class. This type of thinking is conceptualized as Critical Literary Understanding (CLU), i.e., de-automatized, (re)constructive meaning making in response to literary texts. To reach this aim, four empirical studies were conducted. In studies 1, 2, and 3 a model of teaching CLU was developed, by investigating the learning outcomes of, and learning activities within a particular literature program of one Dutch school. The model contains four cognitive subprocesses of CLU (derived from Studies 1 and 2), and four types of learning activities (derived from Study 3) that make these processes – and, therefore, CLU - a more likely outcome of literature tasks. In Study 4, this model was tested. Two instructional approaches towards CLU were compared to regular Dutch literature education for effect on students’ growth on CLU, in a quasi-experimental intervention study (N=341, 6 schools, 13 classes). The dissertation contains six chapters: an introduction (chapter 1), reports on the four empirical studies (chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5) and a general discussion (chapter 6).