Demonstrating the effectiveness of two scaffolds for fostering students’ domain perspective reasoning

Domain perspective reasoning refers both to students’ recognition of authors’ domain perspectives during reading and students’ abilities to draw on varied domain perspectives to reason about and understand a complex social issue. Two instructional manipulations were examined in this study. First, students were asked to identify authors’ domain perspectives during reading (i.e., DP-ID condition) or not (i.e., with authors’ domain perspectives instead supplied in texts). Second students were provided with a Palette of Perspectives as an instructional scaffold to support their inferencing regarding how a common issue, that of immigration, may be examined through a variety of diverse domain perspectives. Although students’ assignment to the DP-ID condition was not associated with the number of domain perspectives they included in writing, both DP-ID condition and being provided with a Palette of Perspectives were associated with students’ performance on a domain perspective application task. Implications for domain perspective reasoning are discussed.