Writing for 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. As one scholar asserts,

. . . an ordinary degree of understanding is missing in many, if not most students. It is reasonable to expect a college student to be able to apply in a new context a law of physics, or a concept in history of which she just demonstrated mastery in her class. If when the circumstances of testing are slightly altered, the sought-after competence can no longer be documented, then understanding-in any reasonable sense of the term-has simply not been achieved.
(Gardner, The Unschooled Mind, p.6)

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.

The term "writing for understanding" [1] refers to writing activities intended primarily to facilitate or develop students' understanding of important subject matter and ability to use knowledge thoughtfully. Writing for understanding 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 for understanding may be even more important than formal writing since it serves as a vehicle through which students build their understanding of subject matter. During the writing for understanding 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 for understanding, 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. [2]

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. Any writing that primarily involves simple recording and recall of facts and ideas does not necessarily build students' understanding of the material. Taking notes, for example, can be a rote learning exercise that does little to promote understanding. Even the traditional "term paper" may fall into this category, especially when students compose their papers by simply extracting and paraphrasing material from primary and secondary sources.

In a nutshell, effective writing for understanding 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 making meaning.

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 grasp. 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. Studies show that under these conditions students are unable to use the information they have memorized and are likely to forget the material. That is, students can recall it on examinations or put it in term papers, but it tends to be "inert" in the sense that students cannot use it thoughtfully (Whitehead, 1929). In contrast, students who understand information within a conceptual framework grasp the relationships and connections among facts and ideas. As John Dewey said,

To grasp the meaning of a thing, an event or situation is to see it in its relations to other things; to note how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it; what causes it, what uses it can be put to. In contrast, what we call the brute thing, the thing without meaning to us is something whose relations are not grasped.
(How We Think, pp. 137-138)

Instructors face critical distinctions between ideas students should be familiar with and those that should become part of their enduring understanding of the subject. Most curricular materials do not do this. Textbooks tend to homogenize the subject, allocating the same amount of space to profoundly difficult concepts as they do to much easier ones. Instructors who are deeply knowledgeable about their subjects should decide what is truly worth knowing and what is secondary of less central to the field.

One way to manage the problem of information overload is to organize courses around generative topics, issues and problems. Generative topics are those that have significance in the discipline and offer connections to many important concepts. Moreover, generative topics provide an organizing framework for learning in the sense that students develop knowledge in order to have a deep understanding of the topic or issue.

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 knowledge to solve problems, articulating an argument, making a case, developing a position, interpreting a theory or text. Writing for understanding 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 a 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 for understanding can play a key role in developing students' grasp of difficult material. In all fields, students encounter persistent problems, difficulties, stumbling blocks, and misconceptions as they try to understand the subject. [3] Instructors can use specific difficulty areas as the bases for designing writing exercises and assignments to help students overcome persistent difficulties.

Examples of Writing for Understanding Activities

Writing for understanding serves two major functions. First and foremost, it engages students in making sense of the course material; writing for understanding influences how students interact with the subject matter in your field. Second, it externalizes students' thinking allowing the instructor to observe and further develop how students understand the subject matter.

Writing for understanding activities can be used at any point in a course-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. 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 for understanding can be useful. And perhaps more important, the analysis will help you design effective activities to promote learning with understanding.

Notes

1. This paper is based on a constructivist view of learning which holds that humans construct knowledge by using what they already know to make sense of new information, events and experiences. This contrasts sharply with the view that humans receive knowledge readymade from other sources. We include more about constructivist theory in two handouts, "The Process of Learning with Understanding," and "Transmission, Involvement and Construction Models of Teaching in Higher Education."
2. Note too how easily the writing activity fits into the class. It gives students a moment to collect and organize their thoughts before talking about them. And since the instructor responds in class to students' ideas, there is no need to read or grade the writing.
3. In some fields students' difficulties and misconceptions are well documented. For a compelling example of how an instructor can deal with the problem of misunderstanding, see the work of Eric Mazur, a Harvard physics professor, in Peer Instruction, Prentice Hall.
4. The handout, "Helping Students Read Difficult Texts," by John Bean summarizes writing strategies that can be used in a wide variety of classes. If you are interested in the technique of "concept mapping" see Learning, Creating and Using Knowledge by Joseph Novak, Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, Publisher.

* This working paper is background reading for the seminar, "Writing for Understanding," presented as part of the Writing-in-the-Major Project at UW-La Crosse. For additional information about this paper, please contact Bill Cerbin or Terry Beck. ©2001, Bill Cerbin and Terry Beck