Disciplinary writing Four empirical studies on historical and philosophical literacy

The aim of this dissertation was to contribute to the development of secondary school students’ disciplinary literacy, with a focus on writing proficiency. Students’ declining literacy levels, and at the same time, society’s elevated threshold, have increased the urgency to respond. In this study, we explored which instructional approach is suited to develop students’ disciplinary literacy effectively and efficiently in upper secondary history and philosophy education.
The thesis is a collection of four studies. The first study was a background study focusing on students’ cognitive processes during source-based writing. The study provided the basis for designing disciplinary writing instruction, since it revealed the disciplinary aspects of the writing process. The second study was a design study, which resulted in an instructional unit for historical writing, applicable to different topics. The third study reported on a larger-scale quasi-experimental study, set up in the history classroom. In the last study, learning materials were adjusted to the domain of philosophy and subsequently implemented by philosophy teachers.
With this dissertation, we advocate the integration of writing tasks that can promote learning in order to work on students’ disciplinary literacy, provided that these tasks are accompanied by discipline-specific strategy instruction. Teachers who participated in our studies considered such instruction - supporting students’ reading, thinking, and writing processes - to be a challenging, yet valuable addition to the content classroom, in order to develop students’ disciplinary writing.