Using writing assignments

The term informal writing, also known as "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. Note that with writing-to-learn the focus in on ideas not on the formal qualities of writing such as correctness, grammar, spelling, formatting, etc.

At a Glance

Purposes of Writing-to-Learn Assignments

• to help students understand and learn
• to promote
  • critical thinking skills (e.g., analysis, synthesis)
  • reflection
  • integration of new information with students' prior knowledge
  • affective/psychic development
  • careful reading
  • class discussion
• to help students discover and formulate problems
• to help students develop problem-solving strategies and skills
• to allow and encourage students to raise questions and concerns
• to sharpen student responses to their academic experiences
• to help faculty monitor student progress through the course

Examples of Writing-to-Learn Assignments

• field or laboratory notes
• reading notes (summaries, analyses, outlines, reactions)
• anticipatory reading notes (preparation for reading)
• research notes
• reactions to a speaker or film
• class logs
• learning logs or journals
• listing topics for papers, discussion, or research
• explaining a task or assignment
• no-grade (or no-name) quizzes
• writing in preparation for discussion
• exploring concepts
• imaginary dialogue (with a theorist? between opposed theorists?)
• process or progress reports
• instructor/student written dialogue
• e-mail & electronic conferences (especially, student to student dialogue)

Methods for Handling Writing-to-Learn Assignments

• Students collect in a notebook or folder to be seen by the instructor N times during the semester and/or
• Instructor collects during class for immediate feedback
• SOME RESPONSE OPTIONS
  • read & comment
  • selectively read & comment
  • evaluate for engagement & effort
  • check that it has been done
  • ask for an assignment to be read aloud in class
  • ask students to read & comment on each other's work
  • read & discard
  • collect & discard

Using Informal Writing in the Classroom

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.

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.

Informal Writing as a Thinking Tool

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.

Writing-to-Learn Resources

Examples of assignments from the WAC Clearinghouse:

• The reading journal
• Generic and focused summaries
• Annotations
• Response papers
• Synthesis papers
• The discussion starter
• Focusing a discussion
• The learning log
• Analyzing the process
• Problem statement
• Solving real problems
• Pre-test warm-ups
• Using Cases
• Letters
• What counts as a fact?
• Believing and doubting game
• Analysis of events
• Project notebooks
• The writing journal

Additional Resources

• The Muddiest PointAnn Carlson, M.Ed., clearly and articulately describes the 'muddiest point' classroom assessment technique. Considered by many to be the simplest classroom technique presented by Angelo and Cross, it can also be incredibly illustrative of what is most important to address in a course. In writing the script for this module, Ms. Carlson culled the most succinct explanations and useful strategies for incorporating this assessment method into courses.
• Using Concept Mapping in Your ClassesDr. Karen Rohrbauck Stout, an associate professor at Western Washington University, has used concept mapping and mind mapping since she was an undergraduate, and now incorporates this assessment technique to improve her teaching in her own college classroom. Students and instructors alike will find her approach to concept mapping fun, efficient, and most of all, an effective learning strategy.
• Concept Mapping SoftwareConcept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a connecting line linking two concepts. Words on the line, referred to as linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two concepts.
• Overview of Writing to Learn (PDF download)Chapter Five from Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum (2005) by Bazerman et al. "In recent years, the writing to learn movement has continued to migrate from general approaches to discipline-specific studies of the relation between writing and learning."

Writing to communicate, which we call "formal writing," is an essential academic and professional skill. But how do students' undergraduate experiences help them develop advanced writing competence? Since scholarly and professional writing are grounded in the discourse conventions of each discipline, we should look to the academic disciplines to play a key role in developing writing competence, assuring that learning to write well is an integral part of the student's education.

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. 

Types of Formal Writing

We do not have a preconceived, one-size-fits-all definition of "writing competence." Rather, individual faculty 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:

• 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.