Disciplinary Literacy in Action: Epistemological Resources for Reasoning with Domain-Specific Texts in History and the Social Science Disciplines

This dissertation presents findings from an expert-lay-novice study designed to explore reader response to text complexity in the history and social science disciplines. Using test items gleaned from standardized assessments of historical and social scientific knowledge in a task-centered, semi-clinical interview setting, this dissertation explores how "good" readers---here, a historian, political scientist, economist, sociologist and psychologist---respond to various conditions of uncertainty and elicitation compared to struggling adolescent readers and secondary school history and social studies teachers. The study investigates how experts, lay readers, and novices respond differentially first, to increasingly complex texts; second, to increasingly complex cognitive tasks; and third, to various text types.;This work contributes to the field by deconstructing the concept of prior knowledge by 1) proposing a taxonomy of domain-specific knowledge types activated to support domain-specific reading tasks in history and the social science disciplines as a case, 2) exploring the role of intuitive knowledge along the expert-novice continuum, and 3) conducting a language cueing system analysis to determine under what conditions a reader activates domain-specific and intuitive knowledge and how cueing system use evolves as a reader approaches and reaches expertise. This dissertation describes the process of reasoning in response to domain-specific texts as the iterative development and refinement of a mental model of a text (or texts), that is central to solving a problem or making a decision, by ascertaining and responding to its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features as they relate to the cognitive demands of the task. Particularly when declarative knowledge gaps are significant, I demonstrate that good readers facilitate problem-solving by 1) strongly activating domain-specific epistemological resources while decreasing their reliance on domain-general and intuitive knowledge, 2) clarifying and exploiting conventions for the use of specific forms and functions of particular types of texts or graphical representations (e.g. the persuasive power of satire compared to a peer-reviewed journal article), and 3) by assessing the merits of and encoding alternative representations to best convey a text's intended content. This work has implications for reading assessment and literacy instruction in the content areas.