Using Writing to Promote Learning

Self-Assessment Question:

Do you know how to use writing activities, not just to test student learning, but to promote better learning?

Quick Take:

Professors have long used essay questions and term papers as a device to test what students have learned in a course. But writing also has the potential to increase the quantity and quality of student learning.

The basic argument in support of writing as a tool for learning is as follows:
"Writing makes students' thinking visible to themselves and to others. Once made visible, a person's thinking can more easily be analyzed, critiqued, and modified. When one's thinking about a topic has changed, one has learned a better (or at least a different) way of thinking about the topic."

What are the key aspects of using writing to enhance the quality of student learning? Various writers have identified the importance of the following three key points:

• Quality of the Question or Assignment. The question or assignment given to students to write about, must be real (authentic), interesting, and worth thinking about. Trite questions lead to trite papers.
• Clarity of the Assessment Criteria. Research on writing assignments used in college teaching reveal that professors are often vague about the criteria that define good writing/good thinking for them. If students have a clear sense of the desired characteristics of the writing/thinking, they can work more effectively to achieve it. (See reference #3 below, for some examples of how to do this.)
• Quality and Frequency of the "Feedback/Re-Write" Process. Students need frequent, high quality feedback on their writing, to use as a basis for re-working (re: re-writing) their ideas. This feedback can come from the teacher or, with proper guidance, from fellow students. When students learn how to assess the writing of others, they learn how to better assess their own writing and thinking.

References:

1. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom by John C. Bean. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. An excellent guide to using writing to promote learning. The first chapter identifies seven steps to "integrating writing and critical thinking into a course", and addresses four widely-held beliefs that keep teachers from using writing.

2. "Writing Skills and Homework Assignments," Section VII in Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. This section has four chapters on different aspects of using writing:

Helping students write better in all courses
Designing effective writing assignments
Evaluating students' written work
Homework: Problem sets

3. "Two Forms for Evaluating Writing Assignments". www.ou.edu/idp/assess.html. This website contains two forms that illustrate how to construct specific criteria for assessing essays by students. The forms are similar in that they each provide weighted criteria for grading the essay. The differences are simply in the criteria that two different professors thought were relevant in two different courses.

4. "Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum", Introductory chapter of Teaching Critical Thinking: Reports from Across the Curriculum by John H. Clarke and Arthur W. Biddle. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. In this opening chapter, the authors introduce a model of critical thinking based on Kolb's learning cycle, and then make the argument that writing plays a key role in learning how to think well because it "…slows the tumult of the mind, making the mechanics of thought susceptible to change." They then show how different kinds of writing assignments should be used to move students through the four different parts of the learning cycle.