How Writing Shapes Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning
Judith A. Langer, Arthur N. Applebee
Language: English
Pages: 186
ISBN: 0814121802
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this groundbreaking study, Langer and Applebee analyzed writing assignments and their teaching across the curriculum in U.S. secondary schools to see how they support learning. "To improve the teaching of writing, particularly in the context of academic tasks," they argue, "is also to improve the quality of thinking required of school children." But they further show here how differences in the kinds of writing students do lead students to do different kinds of thinking and learning.
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worked in his present school for seventeen years, combining his duties as a teacher and head football coach. Although he had taught a wide range of social studies courses in the past, for the last several years he had taught U.S. history and ninth-grade world culture. The project focused on his eleventh-grade U.S. history class. In his initial interview, Royer indicated that his students generally did some writing each week. He used a textbook that took an inquiry approach, and his writing
to get this far, the assignment marked a major turning point in her ability to use writing as part of her science class. She had many failures as well as successes in the remaining months of the project, but she was not deterred by the failures. She had come to believe that even in chemistry it was possible to teach the students to think for themselves, to develop "thought processes such as hypothesis development, conclusions, and designing experiments." These processes were a central part of her
him summarized the plan: Writing #1: Freewriting in which students describe a conflict, picking a difficult choice they had to make between several options and answering the following questions: "Why did you do what you did, and do you think it had anything to do with your training, your character, etc.?" Writing #2: A second freewriting encouraging students to begin to think about motivation - the hidden forces that affect characters' responses to conflict. In this piece, students could be asked
procedures developed by Langer (1980, 1984b, 1984c; Langer and Nicholich, 1981). For each concept word in the knowledge measure, each free association was scored as indicating (1) peripheral knowledge of the concept, (2) concrete understanding (such as examples, attributes, defining characteristic~),or (3) abstract understanding (such as superordinate concepts, definitions). Ratings reflecting levels 2 and 3 were then summed across concepts and raters to derive a total score for each passage.
of the various study conditions on subsequent performance, we need to consider students' initial knowledge of the content of the two passages and their behavior during the study tasks. The results for the pretest measure of passage-specific knowledge, summarized in table 15, indicate that students had similar amounts of background information about the two topics, but also that students showed some variation among study conditions in the extent of their knowledge (p < .07). Because of this, the