WRITING ABOUT AND LEARNING FROM HISTORY TEXTS - THE EFFECTS OF TASK AND ACADEMIC ABILITY

This study examined the effects of three study conditions (review only , study questions, and analytic essay writing) on high school students ' writing and learning from text (concept application, immediate recal l, delayed recall, and recall of manipulated content). An experienced social studies teacher and two levels (general and academic) of her el eventh grade U.S. history course participated in the research. Observa rtional and case study techniques were employed to describe the teache r's pedagogy, and then a volunteer group of students from each class r ead, reviewed or wrote about their reading, and were tested on learnin g from selected history passages. Analyses of the students' writings i ndicated their varying approaches to studying and writing about the pa ssages. Both forms of writing enabled both groups to perform better on all learning measures, with the academic students consistently outper forming the general students. Analytic writing was associated with hig her scores on concept application, while study questions led to better general recall in the immediate and delayed conditions. When recall w as further analyzed for the number of content units contained in the w ritten responses to the two writing tasks, more content units appeared in the analytic writing in both the immediate and delayed conditions. Although the general students' performances on this posttest measure were not as strong as the academic students' performances, they benefi ted move from analytic writing than from answering study questions abo ut the history passages. Because both instructional context and academ ic ability seem to influence students' performances on writing-to-lear n tasks, the study suggests the need for research that will disentangl e these influences to identify the effects of pedagogy and student abi lity on learning from writing.