Analysis of Effective Instructional Sequences in Upper Primary Education (11–12 Years Old Students) to Enhance Content-Learning through the Integrated Use of Reading and Writing

The society in which we find ourselves offers large amounts of information. The messages which we receive come from a number of different and varying sources, that are at times complementary and at other times contradictory. For that reason, it is necessary to compare, contrast and integrate these sources in order to transform the information into knowledge (Pozo & Postigo, 2000). With this in mind, it is important to teach students how to create written syntheses of information from a number of different texts. However, there are very few studies that have proposed teaching the necessary strategies for creating these syntheses. Furthermore, the majority of the studies that have been conducted have been carried out in higher education settings (Boscolo, Arfé, & Quarisa, 2007; Segev-Miller, 2004). Therefore, the Strategies for Writing Syntheses to Learn (swsl) program presented in this chapter has been designed to teach students of 11–12 years old how to appropriately use reading and writing as tools in learning the content which the texts aim to convey. It deals with a program focused on the teaching strategies involved in the elaboration of a written synthesis of various texts. The advantages of this type of instruction, both with reading and writing (Graham&Harris, 1996;Mateos, 2001; Sánchez, García, & Rosales, 2010; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1997; Torrance, Fidalgo, & García, 2007; Zimmerman, 2000), as