There is a lot of research out there on social studies education (less than other areas, but it's definitely getting more important in recent years), and there is a fair amount that focuses specifically on evidence use in writing. It's an exciting time to be thinking about disciplinary (social-studies-specific) reading, writing, and thinking because there are a lot of other people thinking about it, too. I wanted to figure out more about what existing research said in terms of getting my students to write well by identifying, using, and explaining their evidence for an argument. I found a few particularly useful articles (which are also included at the end of this post) that highlight findings about students who already write well and teachers who can help students improve their writing in history classes. Here's what the research says: |
- Use more argumentation strategies - meaning good writers tend to use a larger variety of ways to explain their point and why their evidence and overall argument make sense;
- Integrate and explain their citations and sources more frequently and consistently - so they use more quotations or evidence and do so throughout their writing;
- Use more sources and more from those sources - meaning they use multiple sources and multiple pieces of evidence from those sources; and
- (For middle schoolers) Have organized papers with introductions and conclusions - indicating that for beginning writers, the organization of the writing is also correlated with the strength of the writing, argument, and use of evidence.
- Focus on text annotations - meaning effective teachers spend a lot of time guiding their students through how to take notes and "talk to the text" in historical sources and they also give feedback on the notes themselves (i.e. the students' thinking) rather than just the final product;
- Build writing tasks - so these teachers also start with more manageable tasks like analyzing one source as an informal assessment of student learning before students must use multiple sources in a formal way;
- Give feedback on students' thinking and writing - again, these teachers gave feedback to students all along the way. They didn't just check off that there were some notes on the reading; they looked at the notes on the reading, wrote back, asked questions, and encouraged development of ideas and expression of those ideas through writing; and
- Focus on evidence use and interpretation - rather than other writing concerns, effective teachers decided to really help beginning writers understand the importance of evidence and how to understand and explain that evidence in writing.
Works Cited
de_la_paz&felton-2010.pdf |
de_la_paz et al-2012.pdf |
monte-sano-2008.pdf |
monte-sano-2011.pdf |