Scientific writing: step by step. A project for the long-term development of scientific text competence at school

Although academic writing competence has been the subject of intensive research in an international context since the 1970s, knowledge about how it can be effectively promoted over longer periods of time has been very fragmentary. This is mainly due to the fact that intervention studies investigating the effectiveness of writing support measures under controlled conditions have so far focused on students and have only covered short periods of time. This is because it is practically impossible to create controlled conditions for students over longer periods of time: Students attend preparatory courses for academic writing, read and write academic texts as part of courses, receive feedback from lecturers and sometimes also take advantage of individual writing consultations. With such a large number of influencing factors, it is hardly possible to make clear statements about the effect of a particular writing support measure.

The Austrian educational context currently offers extremely favorable conditions for closing this research gap. This is because, since 2015, the acquisition of academic writing skills has already begun at school: pupils enter into the practice of academic writing as early as secondary school by writing a pre-scientific paper or diploma thesis . In contrast to students, however, it is now quite possible for pupils to create largely controlled conditions over longer periods of time, e.g. as part of preparatory courses: Most pupils do not usually read or write scientific texts outside of such courses. Apart from the support provided by the subject teacher, students do not usually make use of any additional support measures or writing advice.

Three different writing support measures are compared

The FWF project "Development of scientific text competence" uses these favorable conditions for research to conduct the first longitudinal intervention study on the promotion of scientific text competence worldwide. Three different genre-based writing promotion measures(implicit genre acquisition, explicit genre teaching, genre awareness) are compared with each other using a sample of 240 pupils over a period of 3 years (9-12 school level) with a total of 6 measurement points. Although these are among the most prominent approaches in the didactics of academic writing worldwide, they have not yet been sufficiently empirically researched.

Overall, the study aims to show not only how the scientific text quality and writing motivation of students develops under the influence of different genre-based writing promotion measures over a period of 3 years, but also whether and to what extent the scientific text competence acquired during the intervention can be used for writing a pre-scientific paper.