Disciplinary Literacy in History: An Exploration of the Historical Nature of Adolescents' Writing

As the call for adolescent literacy grows louder, attention must be paid to the particular demands of each discipline if educators are to help students develop advanced literacy skills. The hallmarks of advanced literacy are specific to different fields of study. This article proposes a descriptive framework for adolescents' historical writing. Qualitative analyses of 56 written responses to a document-based essay question by high school juniors are used to identify and illustrate trends in adolescents' use of evidence in their historical writing. These trends—referred to as characteristics of students' historical writing—include factual and interpretive accuracy, persuasiveness of evidence, sources of evidence, corroboration of evidence, and contextualization of evidence. This article identifies benchmarks and shares a range of student work samples for each characteristic. Defining the nature of historical writing provides a framework for integrating literacy and content and for exploring and developing advanced literacy skills through the particularities of subject-specific composition.