While writing courses often include instruction in rhetorical aspects of writing (i.e., learning to write), business content courses often assign writing as a tool for learning and assessing content knowledge (i.e., writing to learn), with little attention to students' rhetorical understanding of genres. This leaves students with an incomplete…

Over the past 20 years, claims about how and why student writing can serve learning have changed markedly. This has been partly due to new technologies displacing writing as a predominant resource for learning, prompting new sense-making practices and shifts in how these changes are theorized. Learners now routinely collaborate to generate,…

Explanation as a genre may support children's reasoning and understanding particularly effectively. In this study, 20 fourth graders were given the task of explaining the effects of a pollutant on an ecosystem to third graders. Before writing, they completed a commercially developed science unit, instruction in reading and writing an explanation,…