Structuring the composition process in scientific writing

Abstract

The basis of the research described in this paper was the concern that many pupils, though able to demonstrate a high level of scientific concept understanding during discussion, were much less able to explain their ideas in writing. Data gathered in this study indicates that scaffolding the writing process, both at the sentence level and the text level, facilitates an improvement in the expression of scientific knowledge and concept understanding in pupils' writing. There is also evidence that some scaffolds can promote the process of 'knowledge transformation'.