Writing from Sources: The Effect of Explicit Instruction on College Students' Processes and Products

Abstract

Writing from sources, or “discourse synthesis”, is a common but cognitively demanding reading-writing task requiring students to select, organize, and connect content from source texts as they compose their own new texts. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of explicit instruction of relevant strategies and assessment criteria on the subjects' discourse synthesis processes and products. The subjects, 24 in-service teachers enrolled in the researcher's 1999–2000 course on “Reading and writing to learn”, were assigned the same discourse synthesis task – a review of the literature – at the beginning and at the end of the course. They were required to document their two performances of the task by means of a process log, to assess their pre and post instruction processes and products, and to discuss the differences between these. The findings obtained from a content analysis of the subjects' process log summaries and criterial self-assessments of products indicated significant improvement in the subjects' post instruction discourse synthesis processes and products.