Writing Tasks in Content-Area Instruction for Secondary Students: A Systematic Review of the Literature

• In Event: 16.021 - Modeling Scientific Writing: Current Problems and Potential Solutions for Teaching Writing to Struggling Students

Abstract

Situated within the historical and current state of writing and adolescent literacy research, this systematic literature review screened 2,871 articles to determine the prevalent themes in current research on writing tasks in content-area classrooms. Each article in the final corpus of 37 studies was evaluated and coded using seven methodological quality indicators. The qualitative synthesis of studies is organized by the categories of context, cognition, and content, and the studies are grouped within each category by relevant themes in order to explore how the incorporation of writing tasks into content-area instruction benefits secondary students’ content-area learning and knowledge acquisition. Findings address: explicit-strategy and inquiry-based instruction, the impact of prewriting models, the role of metacognition, and implications for content-area assessment.

Authors

• Diane M. Miller, University of Houston - Downtown

• Erin M. McTigue, Texas A&M University

• Chyllis Elayne Scott, University of Nevada - Las Vegas