Our Approach: Learning to Write, Writing-to-Learn*

• Learning to Write

  • Types of formal writing
• Writing to Learn

  • Examples of activities that promote understanding
• Elements of a Writing-in-the-Major Program
• Recommended Practices

Learning To Write

Writing to communicate, which we call "formal writing," is an essential academic and professional skill. But how do students' undergraduate experiences advance them towards writing competence at the professional level? Currently at UW-L, students take a freshman composition course and at least two writing emphasis courses. These are valuable experiences, but can they fully prepare students for the academic, scholarly, and professional writing they will encounter? It seems that in relying on three courses we are ignoring a significant resource. Since scholarly and professional writing are so thoroughly grounded in the discourse conventions of the disciplines, we should look to the academic disciplines to play a key role in developing writing competence, making learning to write well an integral part of the student's major.

Of course, writing competence, which develops over a long period of time, neither begins nor ends at the university. But the university experience-which should be a significant period of intellectual development-can and should be a significant opportunity for developing strong writing skills. Our aim is to help faculty establish programs that support the long-term development of students' writing competence. We believe that students learn to write well when they:

1. understand the kinds of writing expected of them,
2. internalize the criteria that define good writing,
3. experience guided practice in which their writing is shaped through a process of revision and editing, thus internalizing an efficient and effective composing process,
4. learn to compose with a strong awareness of disciplinary conventions and the needs, knowledge, and attitudes of their audiences, and
5. become progressively better at self assessment.

We do not have a preconceived, one-size-fits-all definition of "writing competence." Rather, in this project, faculty participants define competence as it applies to their disciplines and to their undergraduate students. To facilitate this analysis, we distinguish among three broad categories of formal writing relevant to the undergraduate major.

Academic writing. Perhaps the most common type of formal writing in school is purely academic. Its major purpose is for students to demonstrate their knowledge about a specific subject. It is prompted by instructor questions to describe, explain, discuss, analyze, evaluate (and so forth) and is written for the teacher as the sole audience for the work. Many types of reports and papers fall into this category: essay exams, short answers on exams, research projects, book reports, papers that analyze or critique a specific topic, issue or problem, etc.

Scholarly writing. This includes all the types of writing a working scholar might do. The purpose of such writing is to communicate about the ideas, theories, inquiry methods, and research findings of the discipline. Majoring in a discipline involves entering into and becoming a member of a discourse community-learning to think and communicate like other members of the discipline. Thus, an important aspect of teaching students to write is developing their ability to participate in the discourse community: to use the well-established conventions, rules, and practices that govern scholarly communication. The obvious and most common example of scholarly writing is the article in a scholarly journal. Other types of scholarly writing include grant proposals, laboratory reports, field study reports, critical reviews (of a book, an article, software, a visual object, etc.), review essays, opinion pieces to a professional journal, scholarly response articles, and scholarly essays.

Professional workplace writing. This includes all the writing a working professional must engage in. Some graduates will engage directly in the scholarly discourse of their discipline after graduation; many will become professionals whose primary work is not scholarly. Academic majors, after all, are also pathways to future employment, and a university education can help prepare students for the kinds of writing common in the workplace and professional life. Of course, it is not possible to prepare students for every type of writing they will encounter, but students should have some experience with and expertise in common forms of writing used in the professional workplace. Perhaps most importantly, students should develop a facility to analyze a communicative situation and determine what kind of writing is most appropriate for specific audiences and contexts. Some examples of workplace writing include program proposals, business letters, interoffice memos, reports to co-workers, feasibility studies, program assessments and evaluations, and many different types of writing for lay audiences, such as brochures, pamphlets, guides, instruction sheets, etc.

In summary, a writing-in-the-major program develops students' capacities to write well in academic, scholarly, and professional contexts.

Writing-To-Learn

The term "writing-to-learn" refers to writing activities intended primarily to facilitate or develop students' understanding and thinking. Writing-to-learn activities are a necessary complement to formal writing in that a major cause of poor formal writing is poor understanding of the subject matter. In terms of a student's intellectual development, writing-to-learn may be even more important than formal writing since writing-to-learn serves as a vehicle through which students build their understanding of subject matter. During the writing-to-learn process, the main focus is on making sense of the material and not on communicating it in a specific format to an audience. To illustrate the nature of writing-to-learn, consider the following classroom episodes.

In the middle of a class period, just after explaining an important idea, the instructor pauses and says, "All right, let's stop and think about this for a moment. Does anyone have any questions or comments?" The room is silent and eventually one or two hands go up. Students' questions focus on minor details they want clarified. The instructor answers these and then moves on to the next segment of the class.

Consider the same classroom situation, but this time after the instructor completes the explanation, she pauses and says, "All right, let's stop and think about this for a few minutes. Here's what I want you to do. Take out a piece of blank paper. Don't put your name on it. Now in the next three minutes I want you to answer this question." The instructor poses a question related to the concept she just explained. Students write for a few minutes, and then the teacher interrupts, "Okay, now, even though you may not be completely done with your thought, turn to the person next to you and explain your responses to each other." After several minutes of discussion by the student pairs, the teacher interrupts again and asks for volunteers to give their answers to the question. Quite a few hands go up, and the instructor selects four students to explain their ideas. As they do so, the teacher emphasizes essential points and helps clarify misunderstandings.

In the first scenario, the instructor stops to give students an opportunity to ask questions or comment on the topic. However, the opportunity typically produces fairly low level student responses. And this is actually to be expected. Some research indicates that students do not reflect on the material in these situations, but simply wait for someone to ask a question so the instructor can answer it and then move on. In contrast, the second scenario illustrates how writing-rather than provoking them to await an answer-will actually engage students in thinking about the course material in substantive and sustained ways.

Note how the writing episode contributes to students' learning. First, writing a response engages students in taking stock of what they understand and, possibly, what they still do not understand. Second, talking about their responses with a classmate provides an additional opportunity to clarify and extend their understanding of the material. For the act of explaining an idea to another person involves articulating the relationships and connections among facts and ideas. Moreover, listening to another student's explanation creates an opportunity to compare one's own understanding with a different version. And third, discussing their responses in class externalizes students' thinking so the instructor can take note of misconceptions, offer alternative views, and highlight ideas that students still do not seem to grasp. In effect, the apparently simple writing activity prompts knowledge building activities about the subject.

This example illustrates a key point—writing can be a successful vehicle for learning if it is used strategically to engage students in ways of thinking about the subject that lead to deeper understanding. It is not writing per se that matters but how students interact with the material through writing that matters. Students develop understanding when they explain, when they apply knowledge to new problems or situations, when they develop an interpretation or perspective, when they analyze, when they evaluate, when they integrate and synthesize ideas.

However, it is important to note that not all writing activities involve students in making sense of the subject matter. Taking notes, for example, can be a rote learning exercise that does little to promote understanding. And, writing assignments that primarily involve simple recall of facts and ideas do not necessarily build students' understanding of the material.

In a nutshell, effective writing-to-learn activities are sense making activities that involve students in making connections among disconnected facts and ideas, discerning relationships among ideas, relating new information to what one already knows, applying concepts and theories-whatever actively engages the student in developing understanding.

The idea that writing can enhance student understanding and thinking is a central premise of the Writing-in-the-Major Project, and we want to promote the use of writing-to-learn in three important ways:

1. Integrating and coordinating writing-to-learn throughout the major. Writing-to-learn tends to be used idiosyncratically by instructors. We believe that faculty could use writing-to-learn collectively and more systematically to attain broader student learning outcomes in the major. This project offers the opportunity for instructors to think beyond individual course goals and coordinate their efforts to use writing to attain shared learning goals with their majors.

2. Promoting skilled learning and thinking through writing. There is a difference between using writing-to-learn strategies in your classes to help students understand the subject and teaching students how to use writing as a learning strategy. A goal of this project is to teach students how, when, and why to use writing as a way to better understand and think about the subject. Or to put it another way, the goal is to get students to move beyond complying with (or resisting) writing-to-learn assignments and to foster independent use of writing as a tool for learning and thinking.

3. Understanding how students learn. Writing-to-learn provides a window into students' thinking. Teachers who have a keen sense of how students construe the subject matter are in a better position to design and use knowledge building activities.

A focus on learning with understanding. As teachers, we all strive to foster students' understanding of important concepts, ideas, and skills. Yet a large body of research indicates that students often acquire little more than a passing familiarity of our subjects. Surely, this is not satisfactory-particularly when there are solutions to the problem. We contend that writing, when used strategically, can promote learning with understanding. But designing assignments that lead to understanding requires careful thought. There are, after all, plenty of ways that writing can lead to little more than rote learning. This occurs when students perceive writing assignments as busy work or when assignments merely ask students to transcribe ideas. In order to use writing to foster learning with understanding, it is important to consider several interrelated issues:

1. Determine what is worthy of understanding. We all strive for something more than superficial understanding or surface learning in our students; but students encounter far more information than they can possibly digest. There is good evidence that when students are deluged with information, they resort to rote learning strategies. Rather than try to make sense of the material, they try to memorize it. We do not oppose exposing students to a lot of information, but at the same time we cannot expect students to understand all of it deeply. To deal with this quintessential problem of the Information Age, the instructor must first recognize the difference between having information and understanding information within a conceptual or theoretical construct. Then, you must determine which ideas are central to understanding and which are secondary. We believe that instructors need to make critical distinctions between ideas students should be familiar with and those that should become part of their enduring understanding of the subject, just as they must make distinctions between which information is crucial to understanding and which is secondary.

2. Engage students in performances of understanding. Students demonstrate their understanding in complex activities in which they use knowledge to accomplish larger goals such as conducting an analysis, applying new knowledge to solve problems, articulating an argument, making a case, developing a position, interpreting a theory or text. Writing-to-learn activities should be viewed as "performances of understanding" in which students do not simply demonstrate their grasp of the subject but advance it further. For example, when students are asked to explain an idea, they need to consider how various parts of the concept or concepts are related to one another. The act of finding relationships and connections among ideas is a sense making activity-it is an act of understanding. So the process of explaining not only externalizes students' understanding, it is a knowledge building activity as well.

3. Address difficulties in understanding the subject matter. Writing-to-learn can play a key role in developing students' understanding of difficult material. In all fields, students encounter persistent problems, difficulties, stumbling blocks, and misconceptions as they try to understand the subject. Instructors can use specific problem areas as the bases for designing writing exercises and assignments to help students overcome persistent difficulties.

Examples of Writing-to-Learn Activities that Promote Understanding

Writing-to-learn activities can be used in a number of ways-before, during, and after class. They can be short and unrelated to one another or linked into a series that builds cumulative understanding of the course material over the entire semester. Most importantly, their use depends upon instructors' goals for student understanding. To design them effectively, an instructor must remember that these activities are tools that serve two major functions. First and foremost, writing-to-learn engages students in making sense of the course material. Second, writing-to-learn can be used to externalize students' thinking, providing the instructor with information about what and how students understand the subject matter. Consider these examples.

Writing is most likely to be an effective learning tool when it engages students in making sense out of the subject matter and when it helps students work through conceptual pitfalls, misconceptions, and problems. However, not all writing activities are equally appropriate for every discipline, instructor, and situation. And this is why it is important for instructors to analyze how students learn or fail to learn the subject you teach. We believe the analysis will help you identify key learning problems and the places in your courses where writing-to-learn can be useful. And perhaps more important, the analysis will help you design effective activities to promote learning with understanding.

Putting It All Together: Elements of a Writing-in-the-Major Program

Writing-in-the-Major is a programmatic and developmental approach to advance students' formal writing and writing-to-learn in the major. Since writing, like other complex skills, develops over a long period of time, it is important to create a program that extends across the entire undergraduate experience. By acting collectively-with shared goals, expectations, criteria, and standards-instructors can have a potent, cumulative effect on students' writing and learning. A writing-in-the-major program has six essential features:

Clearly defined goals, outcomes, and standards for student writing in the major. Coherent goals, outcomes, and standards-defined by the department-are extremely important. They provide students with a model of the competence they are expected to develop. Imagine trying to learn a complex skill without a sense of what accomplished performance looks like-learning to play the violin, say, without ever having heard a skilled performer. Or imagine trying to develop a complex skill when the performance standards change continually. Both of these conditions are what students typically experience as instructors use widely different standards. The lack of consistent performance standards makes it very difficult to develop a strong sense of good writing and promotes the belief that good writing is simply a matter of the individual instructor's personal preferences.

A shared evaluation framework. Faculty use a shared evaluation system for assessing the quality of students' formal writing based on department-wide criteria. This does not mean that every instructor must use this framework for every piece of student writing. It does mean that faculty agree to use some shared criteria to evaluate student work. A consistent evaluation system helps students internalize the criteria for effective performance. If students experience quite different evaluative criteria as they go from one class to the next, they quite rightly develop the idea that those criteria are a matter of the instructors' taste. Rather than developing a strong sense of good writing, students focus on figuring out what the instructor wants-which tends to be different from one class to the next. This lack of consistency on the part of faculty can be a major reason for students' failure to show cumulative progress in their development as writers as well as a reason for their failure to be reflective and skilled at self-assessment.

Effective writing processes throughout the major. Formal writing skill develops best when students engage in a recursive process of writing drafts, revising, and editing. Students need feedback and guidance throughout the process in the form of clear expectations, models of acceptable work, help in shaping their subject and purpose, feedback on approaches, and so on. A writing-in-the-major program structures effective writing processes which includes well-informed feedback and guidance.

The most labor intensive part of teaching writing is providing effective feedback and guidance. However, it is unfeasible and probably ineffective to respond in detail to all student writing. This project departs from the idea that the only way students can learn to write well is by having each instructor labor over students' every written word. The challenge is to determine when and how to give feedback and guidance, selecting optimum "teaching moments." For example, since writing-to-learn activities focus on the development of ideas, you wouldn't choose to give feedback on the mechanical aspects writing. Instead, you would give feedback about their understanding-for that, after all, was the point of the assignment. Or, in the case of formal writing assignments, you would give feedback at pivotal points in the development of the assignment when students can still make revisions, rather than after the assignment is completed.

Integration of writing-to-learn throughout the major. Faculty coordinate the use of writing-to-learn strategies throughout the major (i.e., strategies intended to help students learn and understand the subject matter of the discipline). The writing-to-learn component of the project is an opportunity for faculty to cultivate students' deep understanding of important disciplinary knowledge. Recognizing that students rarely achieve the depth of understanding we want, this project invites instructors to approach the problem of student understanding programmatically, by identifying the "big ideas" all students should understand and by using writing as one of the tools to help students achieve that understanding.

Developing mindful writers. Faculty help students develop their abilities to evaluate their own learning and writing. This is an explicit effort to promote students' effective self-assessment and increasing independence as learners and writers. A good writing-in-the-major program produces students who not only write well, but who are mindful of how to improve their own skills. An important goal of the project is to cultivate students' capacities for self-assessment and independent work. As students progress through the major, they should internalize the criteria and standards for writing in the program and become better able to judge the qualities of their own work.

A strategy to improve the writing-in-the-major program. Faculty collectively assess student learning and writing and use the results to make decisions about how to improve teaching and student progress in the program. Assessment is essential for the long-term development and improvement of the program and its goals. By using shared criteria to evaluate student writing, teams will be able to develop a way to collectively analyze student progress and make changes in the program to better meet its goals. There is an opportunity in this project to use assessment of student writing as part of the department's assessment of student learning outcomes. We encourage faculty teams to think about how to accomplish both types of assessment through a single process.

Recommended Practices for Writing-in-the-Major

Clearly defined goals, outcomes and standards for student writing in the major

• Publish goals, criteria, and standards for student writing in "handbooks" and/or on a web site.
• Make available examples of student writing. Preferably, these should be annotated to highlight key features of written work.
• Expose students to examples of good--and poor--published work, again annotating or pointing out what effective and what is not.
• In classes, call attention to how writing of students or professionals meets departmental criteria and standards.

A shared evaluation framework

• Instructors agree to use a shared set of criteria and standards to evaluate student writing.
• Instructors develop some common language and nomenclature for evaluating student writing.
  
• Instructors use common evaluation rubrics which incorporate the departmental criteria and standards, and modify the rubrics to suit different writing assignments.

Effective writing processes throughout the major

• Students analyze and evaluate their own and their fellow students' written work according to departmental criteria and standards.
• Instructors provide clear criteria and standards for writing assignments linked to departmental criteria and standards.
• Instructors give feedback strategically.
• Students learn to revise their work in response to feedback and guidance.

Integration of writing-to-learn throughout the major

• Instructors identify disciplinary knowledge that all students are expected to understand well.
• Instructors use writing-to-learn activities to monitor the development of students' understanding in the program.
• Instructors use writing-to-learn to address persistent student learning problems in the major.

Developing mindful writers

• Students analyze and evaluate their own work according to departmental criteria and standards.
• The department creates "self assessment standards" that clarify progressively more sophisticated self assessment skills.

A strategy to improve the writing-in-the-major program

• The department evaluates writing developmentally at several points in the students' program (e.g., entering, sophomore year, junior, exit)
• Students learn about their progress from the assessment process.
  

* Working paper Last revised May 2001. For additional information about this article, contact the authors, Bill Cerbin and Terry Beck. ©2001, Bill Cerbin and Terry Beck

• See examples of actual departmental practices