Improving Disciplinary Literacy Through Reading Interventions: A Systematic Literature Review

This study presents a systematic literature review of disciplinary literacy (DL) interventions across educational levels, from primary school to university. With growing recognition of the importance of discipline-specific literacy in learning, the review identifies instructional strategies, empirical measures, and student outcomes associated with DL. A PRISMA-guided database search yielded 39 studies that met inclusion criteria. Findings show that interventions mainly target reading, writing, and reasoning skills, with strategies differing by school level: younger students benefit from scaffolded and multimodal approaches, while older students employ self-regulated and metacognitive strategies. Cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural perspectives inform DL’s theoretical framing, but no shared operational definition exists for assessment. The review highlights gaps in rigorous empirical studies, especially randomized controlled trials, and the lack of standardized tools to evaluate DL across disciplines. Evidence suggests positive effects on academic writing, historical reasoning, and disciplinary knowledge, though design limitations and diverse assessment methods weaken overall conclusions. The findings underscore the value of discipline-specific literacy instruction for fostering critical thinking and knowledge construction and call for further research to refine DL implementation and assessment. Appendix A is a detailed chart of included studies; appendix B shows effectiveness' results from the included studies; appendix C shows a detailed list of DL skills and related measures ; appendix D shows a detailed chart of the quality of evidence assessment.