Writing in science can be challenging for all learners, and it is especially so for students with cognitive or language-based learning difficulties. Yet, we know very little about how to support students with learning disabilities (LD) or who are English learners (EL) when asked to write for authentic purposes during science instruction.…

This article reports the results from a study investigating the effects of a discipline-specific reading and writing intervention (I3C/PROVE IT!) with fourth and fifth graders. Participants included 237 students with writing difficulties (WD) from an initial pool of 608 upper elementary school students in a larger study. Teachers and students were…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasize disciplinary literacy by making literacy instruction every teacher's responsibility (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The CCSS require content area teachers to adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support disciplinary literacy…

This study explored the extent to which an 18-day history and writing curriculum intervention, taught over the course of one year, helped culturally and academically diverse adolescents achieve important disciplinary literacy learning in history. Teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship form of instruction for the integration of historical reading…

Historians use a range of genres in presenting their subjects, yet educators have increasingly privileged argumentation to help novices to reason with historical content. However, the influence genre and content knowledge are relatively unmeasured in this discipline. To learn more, the authors asked 101 eleventh-grade students to compose an…

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents' understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers' efforts…

One path to improving adolescents' literacy skills is to integrate reading and writing into the content areas in which such work occurs. Although argumentative writing has been found to help students understand historical content and transform information, scholars do not know the influence of specific task structures on students' writing or…