Reference to Materials in Written Argumentations of Students in Geography Lessons

Abstract

Until now, geography teaching has only touched upon the way in which students write argumentations focused on geographical topics, and the challenges of doing this. In order to shed light on this process, this study considers the problems and challenges students face when using material-based written argumentation in geography lessons. The results from 19 evaluated text products and sound thinking protocols, which were collected in the 8th grade of a comprehensive school, are presented and analyzed. These results show that simultaneously handling several materials at once is a challenge for the students in material-based writing due to a lack of processing techniques.

Writing in Geography Lessons—An Unreflected Routine?

“…The teachers we interviewed often mentioned that students are not motivated to write texts and therefore integrating writing tasks is a challenge that requires a lot of work for the teachers (motivating the students, correcting etc.,). Students' motivation to write in science lessons has been identified as low in previous research too [7,28]. In this study, we also looked at the attitude of the teachers and recognised that they also have little motivation for setting and didactically accompanying writing tasks, thus suggesting that the reluctance of students and teachers to write-related tasks may be mutually dependent.…”

“…In geography lessons, material-supported and problem-solving writing has a special function, as this serves to gain a multi-perspective picture of an issue [41] (p. 28), which is indispensable for the assessment of, among other things, conflicts over the use of space and for strengthening the pupils' competence to act. An empirical study by Schwerdtfeger and Budke [7] showed that material-based writing is a great challenge for students and that they have particular problems with integrating and linking relevant information and geographical spatial references, as well as with text preparation and the linguistic formulation and structuring of arguments. Accordingly, teachers should guide and accompany this language action more intensively didactically [7] (p. 31ff).…”

“…Geography classes also often use writing tasks and require material-based writing from students [6] (p. 67). Studies show that students face greater challenges in this regard, which suggests that support is needed [7] (p. 31ff). Now, subject teachers have only little teaching time with their class, in which they have to teach a variety of subject contents and competencies-thus, it is obvious that the use of active promotion of writing competencies in geography lessons requires to convince teachers.…”

Metacognition in Argumentative Writing Based on Multiple Sources in Geography Education

“…The latter of these observations is supported through further analysis of the empirical results. Concerning the question of material reference (this question was also investigated as part of the SpiGU project), it was clear that the majority of the written texts are deficient in these strategies because the students in particular find it challenging to filter relevant information from the material and, as a result, they integrate very few of the materials into their own argumentative texts (an average of 1.9 materials) [ 24 ] (p. 28). Although the students read all ten materials, they lacked a strategic approach to filtering the central information and arguments from the individual materials and presenting them with the various positions of the actors in their texts [ 24 ] (p. 29).…”

“…It was found that the higher the students’ ability for linguistic complexity, the more likely they were to formulate geographical causal structures correctly with regard to content. Furthermore, Setiawan et al [ 24 ] demonstrated a positive effect of students’ metacognitive skills and learning outcomes in geography education.…”