Effects of writing instruction on adolescents' knowledge of writing and text quality in history

Abstract

Developing adolescents' writing ability is an important goal of present-day education, but hard to attain. In order to write well, writers must possess knowledge about what to write (content knowledge) and how to write well in a particular genre (metacognitive knowledge). Becoming a proficient writer across genres and disciplines requires systematic and explicit instruction. We investigated the effects of domain-specific writing instruction on students' knowledge of writing and text quality in the context of argumentative writing in history. Participants were three history teachers and one Dutch language teacher and their classes (Grade 8, 10 and 11). The teachers each designed a writing intervention based on design principles for effective writing instruction. A pre-posttest quasi-ex-perimental design was used to investigate the effects of each intervention. Results showed a positive effect of instruction on writing knowledge; students in all three interventions produced more writing advice, especially more genre-specific and product-related recommendations. With respect to text quality an improvement on genre-specific aspects was found. Correlational analyses between knowledge of writing and text quality after the intervention only yielded positive effects for the intervention in Grade 8. In sum, this study shows that teacher-designed interventions in secondary education may improve adoles-cents' knowledge of writing and quality of writing.