Writing in history places high demands on students and is a skill that requires explicit instruction. Therefore, teachers need to be able to teach this in an effective way. In this study, the writing-instruction was designed by a teacher, instead of researchers, as part of a professional development program in the Netherlands. The lessons combined writing and historical reasoning instruction, based on principles of effective writing instruction, including strategy-instruction, modeling, prewriting, and peer-interaction. The effects of these lessons were investigated in a small-scale pilot study, which consisted of a pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design, in which eighty-nine 11th grade students participated (39 in the treatment condition and 50 in the comparison condition). Dependent measures included text quality, writing process measures, students' knowledge of writing and their self-efficacy. Students in the treatment condition wrote longer and higher quality texts, spent more time writing, paused more while writing and their knowledge of writing was higher at post-test than for students in the comparison condition. No effects were found for self-efficacy. Furthermore, significant correlations were found between text quality and writing process measures, but not for knowledge of writing and self-efficacy. Overall, the effectiveness of this teacher-designed intervention seemed satisfactory, as it resulted in greater knowledge of writing and better-quality writing in his history classes.

This study aims at gaining more insight in effective writing instruction to promote historical reasoning. In an experimental study, two types of instructions were compared; a general writing instruction and a discipline-based writing instruction. In addition, the effects of these instructions for students with a different initial writing ability were explored. Participants were 42 students (11th-grade), who followed a unit on the development of Dutch democracy and had to write an argumentative letter in which they argued the historical significance of a self-selected event or person. Students received a short writing instruction, based on the principle of learning from text models, in two versions: a general writing instruction or a discipline-based writing instruction. Analyses focused on historical reasoning and global text quality. Results showed a positive effect of discipline-based instruction on the quality of historical reasoning, but no effects were found on text quality. No differences were observed for good and weak writers. A pre- and post knowledge test showed improvement of students' knowledge, but no differences between conditions were found. The outcomes add to earlier studies that found positive effects of discipline-based writing instruction and provide teachers with directions for designing discipline-based writing instructions based on learning from text-models.