Fostering disciplinary literacy through model annotations: the case of historical reasoning

This paper examines whether model annotations can foster disciplinary literacy in higher education. Using history as a test case, 102 education undergraduates participated in a training and transfer task in which they read two-period documents, and responded to recall and comprehension questions, and to a short essay question requiring historical reasoning. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: labeled annotations presented the documents with annotations that were labeled indicating the type of move depicted in the annotation; unlabeled annotations presented the documents with the same annotations but no label; no annotations, this control condition presented the documents without annotations. The transfer task presented all participants with documents with no annotations. Participants in the labeled annotations condition exhibited greater use of historical reasoning than the control condition. This study shows that the use of labeled model annotations is a promising tool for cultivating disciplinary literacy in higher education.