Through modern media information sources are becoming more and more numerous and accessible, so skills in acquiring, analyzing, and processing them are essential for students. These skills come together in writing a synthesis: a text that integrates and represents source information. This writing task is hardly taught in secondary education, but students in higher and academic education are expected to be able to write syntheses. This research project focuses on identifying effective learning activities for students in secondary education practicing these skills, designing a learning program based on these learning activities and testing this program in authentic school settings. We are also investigating whether the effectiveness of the learning program depends on the students’ writing process preference and whether assessment skills for these texts improves after a short training session, using an assessment tool with text scales.

This project is part of an NWO PhD scholarship for teachers.