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,…

Examines progressively more competent writing samples from a third grader's journal to illustrate the possibilities for using journals "across the curriculum." (HTH)

Examines how school writing tasks (notetaking, answering study questions, and essay writing) interact with three measures of learning (recall, concept application, and gain in passage-specific knowledge). (HOD)

Noting that the claim that writing is a way to learn underlies most writing across the curriculum programs, this paper provides an overview of recent research results supporting the claim and emphasizes the need for more research in this area. The paper first identifies three dominant interpretations in the writing across the curriculum…

Examines the relationship between writing and learning in a college-level writing-across-the-curriculum class in philosophy. Results provide a basis for speculation about the conception of the writing/learning relationship and about the viability of further hermeneutical study of student writing. (SRT)

Prepared by classroom teachers, the papers in this collection combine practical knowledge with recent findings from writing research. Among the topics discussed in the 25 papers are (1) student teacher conferences, (2) using poetry to develop writing fluency, (3) writing as a learning process, (4) oral and written discourse, (5) creative dramatics…

Two studies examined the effects of writing on subject learning. For the first study, 322 ninth and eleventh grade students read passages from high school social studies and science texts and engaged in six writing-to-study conditions. Students who wrote essays scored lower on immediate topic knowledge posttests, while the students who used study…

Presents a study in which first grade students wrote about what they had learned or discovered at their math learning center. Suggests that students who learn actively by writing in a journal acquire ownership of the information, and that reflecting on information is more effective than transcribing and reciting. (JC)