Nowadays in higher education, students are often expected to demonstrate their communicative competency when given tasks in which they have to manage information from various sources and produce written work based on that information (Boscolo et al., 2007; Roldán et al., 2011). These tasks follow the typical format of synthesis tasks (ST), which teachers routinely ask their students to do in the classroom as part of their teaching-learning activities (Perin, 2013).

STs are hybrid tasks that require students to use a combination of reading comprehension skills and writing skills (Granello, 2001; Solé et al., 2005, 2013). They involve analysing different sources of information about a topic and producing a new text from that information, appropriately comparing, transforming, and combining ideas in an organized way. Students have to select information, connect it, and organize it in a new text structure to produce new, original written discourse (Spivey and King, 1989; Spivey, 1997). Successfully completing STs demands selecting, organizing, and connecting information. Students must select information because they cannot retain all of the information from what they read, they must choose information to deal with based on relevance or importance. They also have to organize what they have selected within some structure in order to construct a mental representation of the texts, and they must connect the information at a local level to form a new cohesive, coherent discourse (Spivey and King, 1989). STs require students to use recursive reading and writing strategies (Flower et al., 1990; Spivey, 1997; Segev-Miller, 2004, 2007; Boscolo et al., 2007; Mateos and Solé, 2009; Solé et al., 2013). They need to read and re-read the source texts and their own writing, re-examining the source texts to identify relevant information and incorporate it, and re-examining their own text to correct it in a recurrent process allowing the author to transform the source information (Segev-Miller, 2004). ST is also a demanding writing task requiring the mediation of planning, textualization, and monitoring throughout the whole process (Flower and Hayes, 1980), as well as the use of review strategies ensuring a good fit between the student’s on text and the source texts. Previous studies have demonstrated differences in the reading and writing strategies used by students with different levels of expertise in STs, as well as a certain correspondence between the holistic quality of the written product and the strategies used. They also indicate that the more successful ST products are associated with using a range of strategies, and that failed texts are associated with students adopting simple, direct, linear processes that are inadequate for the complexity of STs (Solé et al., 2005, 2013; Mateos and Solé, 2009; Du and List, 2020; Nadal et al., 2021).

The inherent cognitive complexity of STs means that they are highly demanding tasks at the level of cognitive processing and activity, which leads to some university students finding them difficult. Some students approach writing STs in a linear, fixed manner, limiting themselves to repeating the content from the sources and not incorporating or properly organizing the information, as well as applying strategic approaches that are less than effective (Boscolo et al., 2007; Mateos and Solé, 2009; Cumming et al., 2016). These students seem to need specific training that will enable them to do synthesis tasks, and there is empirical evidence of how guiding students to perform these types of tasks produces very satisfactory results. Some studies have confirmed the efficacy of ST instruction in the university context. For example, Zhang (2013) examined the effect of instruction in ST in 190 students split into a control and an experimental group. In the experimental group, five iterations of instruction about writing syntheses were incorporated into the existing course curriculum, which was built on reading, writing, and vocabulary instruction from two textbooks. The students in the experimental group were guided through the discourse synthesis writing process and a range of methods such as reading guides, connection exercises, and peer and teacher feedback on first drafts were used to scaffold the students’ synthesis writing practice. The control group had an equivalent amount of reading and writing practice in other writing types within the same curriculum. The experimental group had significantly better performance in writing synthesis texts, and the study also confirmed the feasibility of incorporating ST instruction in the classroom without significantly altering the study plan, albeit with a notable amount of scaffolding by teachers, materials or peer support. Boscolo et al. (2007) performed an intervention in which 52 students were asked to analyse the characteristics of good and poor synthesis texts, and to write and revise their own. The intervention included 10 sections, with both theoretical lectures on the writing models and practical workshops. Participants practiced academic writing by composing texts which were revised by the teacher, and by analysing and discussing examples of good and poor academic texts. The results showed an improvement in the students’ abilities to write synthesis texts. The intervention was mostly focused on analysis of text characteristics and had an impact on the students’ ability to select information based on structural cues in the text. However, the intervention did not affect the students’ ability to integrate this information in a coherent representation and text structure, probably because it did not include training in procedural or strategic knowledge.

In the Spanish context some studies have included strategic or procedural training. For example, Mateos et al. (2018) evaluated the effectiveness of two types of interventions aimed at improving performance in synthesis tasks, including procedural training. One used a graphical guide with peer practice, the other added explicit instruction with modelling and explanation of the processes involved in synthesis tasks (procedural training). The results showed that the students who had the additional explicit instruction demonstrated substantial improvements in the quality of their work. Granado-Peinado et al. (2019) analysed the impact of interventions involving collaborative writing of argumentative syntheses, which combined explicit instruction with video modelling of writing and collaboration processes, along with a guide and collaborative practice. The effects of this intervention were compared with three other programs in which the amount of help was progressively reduced. Their results showed that in order for students to achieve the desired levels of competency, interventions should include explicit instruction with video modelling. When this instruction brings together help aimed at improving production of argumentative syntheses with help designed to promote collaboration, students can assimilate a greater amount and wider range of information. However, for identifying a high level of arguments, explicit instruction focused solely on helping students write argumentative syntheses turns out to be as effective as help aimed at collaboration. In addition, after interventions encouraging collaborative work, students successfully transfer their newly developed skills to their own, individual writing tasks. In both studies, teachers demonstrated how to perform ST, teaching specific procedures and strategies. Students usually learn to emulate these procedures but do not produce their own strategies.

All of these previous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of instruction in ST in the university context and included content or components of strategic, self-regulated instruction, such as declarative or procedural metacognitive knowledge linked to the text product or the writing process, the use of cognitive strategies, direct teaching about procedural and discourse knowledge writing strategies, modelling, and collaborative or individual practice. The strategic instructional approach has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to improve students’ writing competence at various educational levels (McArthur and Philippakos, 2013, 2022; Graham et al., 2018; Graham and Harris, 2018; van Ockenburg et al., 2019), including university (McArthur et al., 2015, 2022). That said, its complex, multicomponent nature makes it difficult for teachers to use in the real university classroom, it needs a lot of time to implement, along with specific teacher training that normally requires professional development programs (Harris et al., 2022). Furthermore, implementation of strategic instruction programs aimed at encouraging mastery of ST at the university level must consider the characteristics of the students, who usually exhibit relatively defined or mature strategic profiles (Kieft et al., 2007; Robledo et al., 2018; Arias-Gundín and Robledo, 2023). This means that rather than focusing on giving students specific strategies to produce their syntheses, instruction in ST at university should focus on guiding and prompting students so that, as part of the natural learning process in their subjects, they develop and implement their own reading and writing strategies in a self-regulated manner when doing ST. This would allow them to manage their cognitive and motivational processes and keep on with a task even if they become discouraged or find it difficult, which would contribute to a successful approach and consequent learning or mastery (Butler, 1998; van Ockenburg et al., 2019). This is exactly where the present study sits, with the aim of assessing whether it is possible to improve university students’ competencies for synthesis tasks, via strategic instructional processes which, as part of the context of the university subjects, promote self-regulated application of reading and writing strategies by the students. A line that, as far as we are aware, previous research has not addressed.

The objective of this study was to improve university students’ competency in composing STs following implementation of a strategic, self-regulated instruction program designed to encourage students to effectively activate the reading and writing strategies demanded by synthesis tasks. To that end, we compared an experimental group, given instruction through a strategic program that was based on Strategy Content Learning (SCL, Butler, 1992), with a control group, who were taught metacognitive knowledge of different text types in the academic context. Our hypothesis, based on the literature in this field, was that compared to the control group, the students in the experimental group would exhibit greater effective activation of their reading and writing strategies during the synthesis tasks and would demonstrate more improvement in their performance in terms of text product, producing better-quality syntheses.

The results confirmed this hypothesis, and with it, the efficacy of the strategic, self-regulated instruction program for promoting improvements in the quality of university students’ synthesis texts, and in the activation of reading and writing strategies. Compared to the control group, the students in the experimental group demonstrated greater improvements in the overall quality of their synthesis texts, producing work with connected, hierarchical ideas and details, demonstrating clear sequences of ideas and fluid discourse. Their texts also exhibited appropriate text organization, with paragraph structures for introductions, development and conclusions that were suitably cohesive. In addition, their texts displayed suitable levels of vocabulary, syntax, spelling, and presentation.

Following the program, the experimental group also exhibited greater improvements than the control group in effective activation of reading strategies, such as taking notes while reading. They also showed greater improvement in writing strategies—especially those related to planning their texts—considering structural aspects of the text when planning, such as the introduction and conclusion, and explicitly demonstrating the use of strategies. The greater improvement in the experimental group’s text quality was maintained over the long term, shown by the follow-up assessment one year later, although it is worth emphasizing that both groups demonstrated improvements in text product scores at the follow-up evaluation. This shows some consolidation of synthesis competencies in university students, presumably driven by their progress in their degree courses. These are courses that generally use active methodologies requiring increasingly active, strategic, and self-regulated learning from the student (Robledo et al., 2015; García et al., 2017).

Hence, in light of the scientific literature in this field, our study confirms that—with proper guidance from teachers via implementing strategic instructional processes (Graham et al., 2018; Graham and Harris, 2018) within the context of the curriculum study plan (Zhang, 2013)—students can adapt and re-work their own strategies (Butler, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998), in this case for reading and writing, and apply them in a self-regulated manner when doing complex academic tasks, such as synthesis, improving the quality of their texts and of some of the cognitive processes involved (Boscolo et al., 2007; Mateos et al., 2018; Granado-Peinado et al., 2019). Despite that, the program implemented in this study did not contribute to any significant improvements in the processes of selecting information required by ST and related to selecting ideas from source texts. These processes seem to be among the most well-developed in university students (Robledo et al., 2018), which is why the range of improvement is smaller. The program also failed to produce significant improvements in processes for connecting information, including cohesion or incorporating ideas from source texts into the ST. These processes for connecting information require students to deeply read the source texts in combination, which in this case are complex academic texts. They also involve rewriting and connecting the ideas taken from the texts into a new written discourse. This may represent an additional challenge for students who, faced with the complexity of the materials they have to read, only engage with them superficially and fail to achieve the in-depth understanding that would allow them to write about the new ideas (Beck et al., 1996; van Ockenburg et al., 2019). Processes related to reviewing writing also failed to show any significant improvement, possibly because students activated them when they were cognitively drained after having focused their efforts on detailed planning or even after drafting the text. Students need greater cognitive flexibility and to recursively activate all of the cognitive processes involved in producing STs to achieve optimum levels of functionality (Mateos et al., 2008). Finally, the lack of a proper metacognitive representation of synthesis tasks often conceptualized by students as summaries (Mateos and Solé, 2009; Robledo et al., 2018), may also explain the poor activation of some core processes for these tasks. In any case, it is clear that our results call for future studies that seek deeper explanations and that can provide more specific guidance to teachers in terms of functional activation of all of the processes involved in producing synthesis texts through effective development and deployment of specific strategies linked to each process and through spending more time on their practical application (Merrill, 2002; Van Ockenburg et al., 2019).

Despite that, we can conclude that instruction based on stimulating students’ own strategies and encouraging self-regulated application of them in synthesis tasks is effective and contributes to students producing better quality texts, organizing information better, and more effectively activating some of the reading and writing processes these types of tasks call for. This may be because this type of instruction allows students more control over their cognitive and emotional processes, meaning that they approach these tasks with greater motivation and are able to keep at them and complete them successfully, even with the challenges they present (Butler, 1998; Navea-Martín and Suárez-Riveiro, 2017; van Ockenburg et al., 2019). To sum up from a theoretical-empirical perspective, we can conclude that implementation of strategic instruction programs aimed at encouraging ST mastery at the university level should consider how strategically mature the students are and their potential to create and modify their own strategies (Kieft et al., 2007; Robledo et al., 2018; Arias-Gundín and Robledo, 2023). Teachers must focus on guiding and prompting students so that they develop and implement their own strategies in a self-regulated manner when doing ST. Therefore, it seems that in the university context, sequences of strategic instruction programs can be simplified, as can their component parts. Students, with the teacher’s guidance, can develop their own strategies and apply them appropriately to perform synthesis tasks.

Nonetheless, these conclusions should be understood considering the limitations of the study. One limitation is the small sample size, which was taken from a specific course that was part of one degree at one university. This limits the possibilities of generalizing the results, and means that it would be interesting for future studies to use a larger sample and also to do more complex statistical analysis, such as mixed-effects models, with observations grouped within individual students and students nested within classes, given that the present study is not immune to the clustering effect. This was an early pilot study in this field, which used a similar sized sample to other international studies in the same area (reviewed in the introduction). In addition, having 20–25 students in a class was ideal for learning. Given that, more studies, and more robust statistical analyses, are needed to test whether synthesis writing instruction is effective for a wider range of students. It would also be useful to consider other types of intrinsic student variables that might affect the results. In this case, because the instruction was based on the students readjusting their own strategies, it would be useful to determine a general strategic profile for the students and a profile of their reading and writing strategies, which seem to vary between students and affect how they face learning activities in general and written tasks in particular (Kieft et al., 2007; van der Loo et al., 2018; Arias-Gundín and Robledo, 2023). In addition, it would be interesting to use more evaluation instruments, including ones which would allow measurement of qualitative changes in critical writing skills, which would guide interventions more accurately (Deane and Song, 2014). Another limitation to highlight is that the teachers tasked with implementing the program had experience in teaching written composition. This makes it difficult to say whether other teachers with less expertise in teaching processes would be able to apply the program with similar success. In line with this, on a practical note, it is worth emphasizing that the instructional program tested in this study could be applied in different subjects and may be an interesting methodological tool for teachers because, in addition to helping improve students’ syntheses, it provides an active method to access content for various learning goals (van Ockenburg et al., 2019), facilitating students’ autonomous learning and skill development.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving humans were approved by Comité de ética University of León for the studies involving humans. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. All students agreed to participate voluntarily after verbal informed consent was obtained. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

PR: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. MÁ: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Resources, Writing – review & editing.