The Finnish National Curriculum encourages primary school pupils to document their working processes of crafts classes into electronic portfolios. In their research, Virva Törmälä and Pirjo Kulju explored the quality of a sample of digital work descriptions (N=79) produced by third graders (N=42), based on their crafts artefacts, during a one-year learning project in a Finnish primary school.
Based on a qualitative analysis, six main dimensions of work descriptions as a textual genre emerged: word count, crafts vocabulary, structure, spelling, multimodality, and self-assessment. The quality of work descriptions was analysed according to scoring criteria based on these dimensions. A cluster analysis indicated that there were three groups of work descriptions with respect to their level of disciplinarity: limited, emerging, and advanced descriptions.
When comparing limited work descriptions with emerging disciplinary work descriptions, in emerging disciplinary texts the word count increased, and the structure strengthened. However, crafts vocabulary usage did not strengthen until the descriptions of the advanced work group.
The study showed that effective disciplinary literacy instruction can begin in the elementary stages, even with pupils aged 9 to 10 years, and it is possible to develop both generic and disciplinary literacy skills and strategies simultaneously.
The data included digitally produced work descriptions (N=79) written by 42 Finnish speaking third-grade pupils.
Primary school teachers can apply the textual modelling of work descriptions when guiding students in documenting their crafts.
The research article is published in Journal of Writing Research
https://jowr.org/index.php/jowr/article/view/1041