Disciplinary Literacy: A Study of Students' Discipline-Specific Motivation

• In Event: Literacy Education in Adolescence and Beyond

Abstract

Literacy in the disciplines is essential for students to engage in critical reading, writing, and discursive practices to construct understanding, but there are still few studies on literacy motivation in a certain discipline. Under the need for studying domain-specific literacy motivation, this study was conducted as a part of a five-year research project to explore students’ literacy motivation in social studies. Based on the theoretical frameworks of disciplinary literacy and literacy motivation, we analyzed students’ competence belief and interest (as proxies of motivation) and their literacy achievement in successive discipline-specific literacy tasks in social studies. From a mixed methods design, the findings showed that students’ motivation and its regulation tendencies and the relationship with their achievement.

Authors

• YongJun Lee, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Laura Lemanski, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• David G. O Brien, University of Minnesota