Student texts produced in the context of material-based argumentative writing: Interdisciplinary research-related conception of an evaluation tool

This paper focuses on student texts produced in the context of material based writing and presents a text analysis grid which is developed in an interdisciplinary research project between the didactics of geography and of German language. Based on a critical discussion of the typical methodological procedures that are currently used in research to evaluate the quality of written argumentations, we argue that only a combination of structural, linguistic and content-related analysis steps can determine the quality of argumentative texts as a whole. Hence, there is a particular need for development in text product analysis with regard to linking the various aspects. We therefore propose a catalogue of criteria, which is interdisciplinarily theory-guided and enables a quantitative and qualitative in-depth-analysis of text products on multiple levels: content-related, structural, linguistic and material-related with special consideration of the multiple document input.