Writing and Reasoning

Writing and ReasoningAuthor(s): Arthur N. ApplebeeReviewed work(s):Source: Review of Educational Research, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 577-596Published by: American Educational Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1170176 .Accessed: 09/10/2012 00:18

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Review of Educational Research Winter, 1984, Vol. 54, No. 4, Pp. 577-596

Writing and Reasoning

Arthur N. Applebee Stanford University

What contribution, if any, does written language make to intellectual development? Why, if at all, should we be concerned with the role of writing in our culture in general, and in our schools in particular? To what extent should we strive, as a recent report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has urged, to make clear and effective writing a "central objective of the school" (Boyer, 1983, p. 91)? If we do, can we assume that we will also be helping students develop the "higher order" intellectual skills, the "skilled intelligence," demanded by the authors of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983)? Questions such as these provide the context for the present review.

At one level, it is widely accepted that good writing and careful thinking go hand in hand. This assumption underlies the concerns of the Council on Basic Education in their critique of the role of writing in American schools (Fadiman & Howard, 1979). The same assumption plays a major role in the agenda for research on writing developed by the National Institute of Education (Whiteman & Hall, 1981) and in the curriculum suggestions offered by advocates of "writing across the curriculum" (Applebee, 1977; Fulwiler & Young, 1982; Martin, D'Arcy, Newton, & Parker, 1976; Marland, 1977; Newkirk & Atwell, 1982). The role of writing in thinking is usually attributed to some combination of four factors: (a) the perma- nence of the written word, allowing the writer to rethink and revise over an extended period; (b) the explicitness required in writing, if meaning is to remain constant beyond the context in which it was originally written; (c) the resources provided by the conventional forms of discourse for organizing and thinking through new ideas or experiences and for explicating the relationships among them; and (d) the active nature of writing, providing a medium for exploring implications entailed within otherwise unexamined assumptions.

If writing is so closely related to thinking, we might expect to begin this review with studies of the contribution of writing to learning and instruction. Yet research on writing has been remarkably slow to examine the ways in which writing about a topic may be related to reasoning. (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, & Schorer, 1963, provide a good review of the concerns that dominated early studies of writing.) Two different traditions contribute to this reluctance: The first treats the process of writing as the rhetorical problem of relating a predetermined message to an audience that must be persuaded to accept the author's point of view. In this tradition the writing problem is one of audience analysis rather than of thoughtful examination of the topic itself. The second tradition assumes that the process of writing will in some inevitable way lead to a better understanding of the topic under consideration, though how this comes about tends to be treated superficially and anecdotally.

Preparation of this review was supported in part by grant number NIE-G-82-0027 from the National Institute of Education. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the funding agency.

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This article will address three general areas of research that are relevant to the question of the relationships between writing and reasoning: (a) the cultural consequences of written language, including arguments that writing leads to general changes in reasoning ability; (b) the individual consequences of writing on particular occasions, including arguments that the process of writing fosters fuller (or at least different) understanding; and (c) the status of writing activities in American schools, including an examination of what counts as "knowing" a subject under study.

The Cultural Consequences of Literacy A number of studies have examined the cultural consequences of literacy, in

particular the extent to which the spread of reading and writing has led to corresponding changes in conventional modes of thinking. These studies began with examinations of the nature of folk epics, which we receive as written versions of originally oral renditions (Havelock, 1963; Lord, 1960; Parry, 1971). Arguments derived from this tradition have stressed the importance of literacy as a precursor of and a precondition for the development of systematic historical and logical modes of thinking. Goody and Watt (1963), in one of the classic statements of this argument, draw both on historical evidence of the evolution of particular cultures and on anthropological studies of differences among contemporary cultures. The argument they build has several parts: (1) In preliterate societies, the cultural tradition is transmitted orally, in face-to-face communication. This allows the culture to forget or transmute those parts of its history that are no longer relevant. (2) This in turn has a stabilizing influence on the culture as a whole. (3) With the acquisition of literacy, and in particular with its widespread dispersion within a culture, individuals are confronted with an historical past that may challenge or seem inconsistent with contemporary reality. (4) In turn, historical inquiry becomes possible, and with it scepticism about the present traditions as well as past events emerges. (5) Faced with alternative explanations, societies develop systems for assessing these explanations; this is the progression that led to the "logical, special- ized, and cumulative intellectual tradition of sixth-century Ionia"-the Greek heritage of Western civilization. As Goody and Watt (1963) describe it,

The kinds of analysis involved in the syllogism, and in the other forms of logical procedure, are clearly dependent upon writing, indeed upon a form of writing sufficiently simple and cursive to make possible widespread and habitual recourse both to the recording of verbal statements and then to the dissecting of them.

Other commentators have similarly speculated that the advent of literacy has radically altered a society's modes of thinking. Havelock (1973, 1976, 1980) attributes these changes to the advent of alphabetic writing systems, which provided a more consistent correspondence between sound and symbol than did the syllable- based systems they replaced. (This in turn lessened the dependence of a text on meanings that were already shared by reader and writer, and made it easier for writing to convey new ideas rather than restatements of what was already known.) Ong (1958, 1971), studying literary genres in the 15th century, concludes that the mass distribution of materials (and accompanying widespread literacy) made possible by the printing press led to new forms of thought and inquiry. McLuhan (1 962), Parry (1971), and Innis (1951) have advanced related arguments.

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Olson (1977a, 1977b), in a recent reformulation of these arguments, traces their implications for contemporary issues in language studies. Olson's central distinction is between "utterance," a predominantly oral version of language use that is highly context bound, and "text," which is a predominantly written version of language use that is more formalized and independent of context. In Olson's argument, the development of language as text depended first on the development of the Greek alphabet, which produced the necessary explicitness in language use while being simple enough for mass literacy, and second on the development of printing, which allowed the development of the British "essayist technique," exemplified first in the writings of John Locke during the 17th century. Olson (1977a) summarizes the differences between utterance and text in three crucial domains: meaning, truth, and function. Meaning in utterances derives from context and background knowledge, while meaning in text derives from the premises in the text itself. Truth in utterances stems from consistency with "the wisdom of the elders," while truth in text is more scientific, a product of correspondence between statements and observations, whether or not the conclusions make "common sense." Finally, the functions of utterance are primarily interpersonal, while those of text are primarily logical or ideational. This shift in function, Olson (1977a) claims, may be the source of "the greater demand for explicitness and the higher degree of convention- alization." He continues:

The bias of written language toward providing definitions, making all assumptions and premises explicit, and observing the formal rules of logic produces an instrument of considerable power for building an abstract and coherent theory of reality. The development of this explicit, formal system accounts, I have argued, for the predominant features of Western culture and for our distinctive ways of using language and our distinctive modes of thought.

Olson concludes with the observation that oral language is nonetheless the language children bring with them to school, and that schooling, in turn, "is the critical process in the transformation of children's language from utterance to text." In later studies, Olson and his colleagues have gone on to explore the nature of this transformation, focusing particularly on children's developing ability to separate context-based "speaker's meaning" from decontextualized "text meaning" (Hild- yard, 1979; Olson, 1980; Olson & Nickerson, 1977, 1978; Olson & Torrance, 1981; Pike & Olson, 1977).

Historical arguments about the relationship between literacy and cultural change necessitate a high level of inference. There is much besides the acquisition of literacy at work in the societies that are described, and though an author may acknowledge the complexity of historical change, there is no way such studies can untangle the diverse influences at work.

Studies of contemporary societies allow a more complete exploration of the effects of literacy and cultural change (Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield, 1966; Good- now, 1976). Greenfield and Bruner (1966, 1969) studied the Wolof of Senegal, comparing the performance of three groups on a variety of conservation and concept formation tasks: rural unschooled children and adults, rural schooled children from the same villages, and urban schooled children from Senegal's capital. In these studies, children with a few years of education showed consistent differences in performance from their unschooled agemates, particularly in their tendency to

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use superordinate linguistic contexts to frame and explain their answers. Greenfield and Bruner (1969) hypothesize that these school influences result from "the training embodied in written language"; the role of the school is one of "establishing context-independent modes of thinking through the separation of the written word from the thing it stands for and the separation of school from life" (p. 652).

Luria (1971, 1976), in a recently reported series of experiments, studied the effects of the great social transformations that took place in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, on the cognitive processes of peasants in remote regions of central Asia. Because of the speed of social change during this period, Luria was able to study people from the same villages at different points in historical development, that is, individuals whose lives were at different stages in the transition from an illiterate, traditional culture to a literate, collectivist society. Although even the most literate of the groups he studied had been exposed to only short-term education and the rudiments of literacy, he found differences in a variety of aspects of cognitive processes: perception, generalization, deduction, reasoning, imagination, and the analysis of one's own psychological processes.

As a group, however, such studies have almost inevitably confounded the effects of literacy with the effects of schooling, since it is in the context of schooling that children usually learn to read and write. (Greenfield & Bruner, 1969, incorporate this confounding into their hypothesis that the effects are due to the role of the school in providing instruction in written language.) The one study that has managed to avoid this confounding is Scribner and Cole's extensive research on the Vai people of Liberia (Goody, Cole, & Scribner, 1977; Scribner & Cole, 1981). There are three written languages among the Vai, with overlapping but far from identical distributions: English, learned primarily through formal schooling; Arabic, learned primarily in traditional and highly ritualized contexts (e.g., memorization of long segments of the Qur'an); and Vai, learned through informal contexts and limited to a specific set of social roles. The combination of different written languages learned in different contexts of schooling allowed Scribner and Cole to separate the effects of literacy from the effects of schooling. Their complex findings are based on both extensive testing of intellectual abilities and ethnographic descriptions of the contexts for literacy among the Vai people. Instead of a general effect of literacy on reasoning, however, they found that the effects of literacy on an individual's intellectual abilities must be traced at the level of the particular kinds of knowledge and skills associated with the use of a particular script. The broadest set of effects found in their study stemmed from the influence of formal schooling. These effects were concentrated in tasks requiring verbal explanations: explanations of sorting decisions, explanations of logic, explanations of grammatical rules, game instructions, and answers to hypothetical questions about name switch- ing; in other skills tested, the effects of schooling were less predictable, and in general were less important than other predictors, such as experience in urban settings or age. Rather than accepting the claims of earlier studies that schooling leads to general cognitive effects, Scribner and Cole conclude that the one hypothesis about schooling that is consistent with their data is that "school fosters abilities in expository talk in contrived situations" (p. 244). They point out further that these effects seem directly related to the nature of classroom dialogue, in which teachers ask questions very much like those they asked in their study: "What made you give that answer? How do you know? Go to the board and explain what you did" (p. 255).

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The effects of reading and writing in particular scripts were more localized than the effects of schooling, but were not completely subsumed by them. Thus Vai script literates performed better than schooled subjects on an auditory integration task that was designed to parallel some of the special features of using Vai script; similarly, training in Qur'anic literacy led to better performance on an incremental recall task that paralleled the ways in which the Qur'an was taught. Conversely, as tasks moved farther away from specific script-related skills, the effects of either Vai or Qur'anic literacy on task performance diminished.

The major lesson to be drawn from these comparisons is that the notion of written language as a unitary phenomenon, differing in a clearly specifiable way from spoken language or from cultural traditions, and thus having clearly specifiable effects on either individual or cultural development, is much too simplistic. Instead, writing is better viewed as a medium for the many uses of language, and in trying to trace its effects we need to look at the functional roles that writing and literacy play in particular cultural or individual settings. Though some of these roles may be better served by written than by spoken language, they are not by definition implicit in the acquisition of literacy.

Writing as a Reasoning Process

Another set of analyses of the relationships between writing and thinking have concentrated on the effects of particular writing experiences on the writer's own understanding of particular topics. Many authors have commented on this aspect of the writing experience, beginning with the classical rhetoricians and continuing in current studies of the writing process. The underlying assumption is typified by E. M. Forster's query, "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" Many rationales have been advanced to explain this relationship between writing and thinking, though the rationales have rarely been put to empirical test. Olson (1977a), summarized earlier, highlights the role of written language in emphasizing logical rather than interpersonal language functions, and in separating those functions from the press of immediate context. These two developments, in turn, make writing the preeminent tool for rational thought. Emig (1977), drawing equally on the speculations of philosophers and the findings of psychologists in order to explore why writing works so well as a tool for reasoning, charts a variety of correspondences between learning strategies and aspects of the writing process. The features of writing that she finds most important to its role in thought are that writing is (a) integrative, drawing on a variety of modes of representation; (b) available for review and reevaluation; (c) connective, establishing "explicit and systematic conceptual groupings through lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical devices"; and (d) active and "self rhythmed."

The classical rhetoricians, beginning with Aristotle, provided the earliest exploration of the reasoning processes accompanying composition (though their rhetorics were concerned with oratory rather than writing). The arts of classical rhetoric included invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Of these, the art of invention is concerned with the development of the writer's understanding of the topic; indeed, invention in classical rhetoric was a set of heuristic procedures-the topoi or topics-designed to insure a thorough exploration of all the grounds for argument. (On the history of invention, see Young, 1976). Aristotle's (trans. 1975) Rhetoric, for example, treats the topoi as an inventory of the kinds of evidence that may be used to develop a particular argument. Aristotle's topics have been arranged

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and rearranged by later rhetoricians, and will seem very familiar to anyone who has used American composition textbooks. They include such procedures as definition, comparison and contrast, tracing of causal relationships, examining time sequence, moving from parts to the whole, and formulating alternative courses of action. By using the topics, the accomplished rhetorician could be assured of uncovering all of the relevant grounds for an argument, and in that sense could be seen to be fully exploring the subject under consideration. The topics, in effect, provided a way to reason one's way through new material (Winterowd, 1973).

The classical rhetorics were concerned primarily with spoken arguments, however, and were sceptical about the value of writing itself. Plato (trans. 1952) saw writing as a threat to the traditional intellectual training inherent in memorization and debate, and warned that a reliance on writing would lead inevitably to forgetfulness and a pretense of wisdom.

Contemporary teaching of writing still draws heavily on the classical rhetorics, though Aristotle's principles are sometimes curiously distorted in their contemporary renditions. The topoi, for example, were originally conceived of as generative techniques, useful heuristics for exploring a subject. But composition texts, which form the basis of most writing courses, tend to present these procedures as paragraph structures or essay types (Meade & Ellis, 1970). They no longer function as guides to reasoning, but as formats for presenting information that the writer is assumed to already understand. This static treatment of the topoi is in part the result of the early history of the teaching of composition in the vernacular. During the 18th and 19th centuries, when contemporary rhetoric was emerging at Glasgow and Edin- burgh, the focus was on the analysis of "classical" texts-of the best that had been written. Such analyses inevitably emphasized the form of the finished product rather than the thinking through of a topic during the writing process, and the teaching of composition became a prescriptive, product-oriented enterprise. (On the history of composition and rhetoric, see Applebee, 1974; Connors, 1981, 1984; D'Angelo, 1984; Howell, 1971; Lunsford, 1982; Murphy, 1972; Tate, 1976.)

The Writing Process

Recent research in writing has been marked by a return of attention to the writing process. Emig (1971), in a seminal study, analyzed think-aloud protocols from eight 12th grade writers as they completed several writing tasks. Though her analyses seem impressionistic in comparison with more recent studies, her protocol data clearly demonstrated that the writing process was a complex and recursive enterprise worthy of study in its own right. Over the next 10 years, a flood of studies followed, once again emphasizing the essentially heuristic, problem-solving nature of writing about new material. (These studies have been reviewed by Humes, 1983, and will not be re-reviewed here.) Flower and Hayes, in a series of papers, have presented the most thoroughly formalized model of the writing process (Flower & Hayes, 1980a, 1980b, 1981; Hayes & Flower, 1980). Their studies have stressed the importance of problem-solving strategies in successful writing, and Flower (1981) has even written a composition textbook that emphasizes a problem-solving approach. The most compelling findings from the various process-oriented studies include the following:

(1) Writing involves a variety of recursively operating subprocesses (e.g., planning, monitoring, drafting, revising, editing) rather than a linear sequence;

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(2) writers differ in their uses of the processes; and (3) the processes vary depending on the nature of the writing task.

The process studies claim, virtually without exception, that writing is a learning process, and there are many aspects of the process that we might expect to be related to learning: Planning processes can involve generating new ideas, as well as making new connections among old ones; reviewing (or monitoring) processes can involve attention to the consistency of an argument (rather than simply to errors in the mechanics of transcription); and revising can involve changes in the meaning of what has been written. Yet none of the process studies provides useful evidence of how-or even whether-any such learning actually takes place. In fact, given the continuing separation of process and product in this research, it is not clear that such studies can provide evidence to support this continuing claim.

Flower and Hayes's work can illustrate the basic problem. In a 1980 article (Flower & Hayes, 1980a), they directly address the question of "discovery" or invention in the writing process. In their words, "we wanted to explore the problem- solving or discovery process that produces new insight and new ideas." Basing their argument on analyses of think-aloud protocols of novice and expert writers, they demonstrate that the experts engage in a much more elaborate process of problem construction, as reflected in their attention to the purposes and goals of their writing. Flower and Hayes's analysis traces the writers' attention to the rhetorical situation, as well as their attention to goals related to audience, self, text, and meaning. Concern with meaning, "the writer's attempt to build a coherent network of ideas," in fact receives proportionately less overt attention from the expert than from the novice writers in the data they present (41% vs. 19% of the times the writer explicitly represented an aspect of the rhetorical problem in the first 60 lines of protocol).

Such analyses help us understand the kinds of concerns that dominate a writer's attention, but do little to elucidate the relationship between those concerns and the writer's understanding of a topic. The novice writers' attention to meaning in the Flower and Hayes data may reflect a developing understanding, or the frustration of not knowing what to say. Similarly, the expert writer's attention to audience may involve relatively trivial reordering of available knowledge in order to build an effective argument for a specific audience, or may lead to extensive reorganization and elaboration of the writer's own understanding.

In a later paper, Flower and Hayes (1984) advance the argument that the writing process involves multiple representations of meaning, ranging from "imagery, to metaphors and schemas, to abstract conceptual propositions, to prose." The writing plan a writer constructs is both a path through the available information and a preprocessing of information from long-term memory-a processing that may make it easier to express that information in prose. Along the way, abstract representations are tested through their instantiation in prose, and nonverbal representations of knowledge are re-represented in prose. The Flower and Hayes analysis is helpful in conceptualizing some of the features of the writing process that may lead to fuller understanding of a topic, though the protocol analyses that they provide do not provide a measure of understanding of subject matter-before, during, or after the writing tasks that are studied.

A study by Langer (1984) suggests that topic knowledge does play a significant role in what a writer does. She measured 10th grade students' knowledge of specific social studies concepts just before they were asked to write on related topics. As

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predicted, there was a strong and significant relationship between topic knowledge and writing quality. Of most interest, however, was the finding that the way in which the knowledge was structured had different effects depending on the type of writing task. In general, students whose knowledge of a topic was better organized did better on topics requiring them to compare and contrast relevant issues, while those whose knowledge was more extensive (but not necessarily better organized) did better on topics requiring them to provide supporting evidence to elaborate a thesis. The ways in which students redefined particular topics in the course of responding to them were also related to the ways in which their initial knowledge was structured. Though Langer was concerned with the influence of topic knowledge on writing, rather than of writing on later understanding, her study is one of the first to begin to examine the relationships between these two factors.

Studies of Writing as a Way of Reasoning Few studies have looked directly at the effects of writing in coming to understand

new material. Writing following reading can, however, be interpreted as a version of "adjunct questioning" (Rothkopf, 1966, 1972), making it possible to draw on the extensive series of studies that have examined the effects of adjunct questions on comprehension of new material. Reviews emphasizing different aspects of this literature are available in Anderson and Biddle (1975), Andre (1979), Reder (1980), and Rickards (1979).

Studies in this tradition have, for the most part, been concerned with the effects of only the simplest forms of writing activities (multiple choice or short answer responses, and sometimes notetaking). In spite of this limitation, the tasks that have been studied share certain features with more complex writing tasks. In particular, these studies provide useful information about the effects of manipulation or review (from text or memory) in the process of learning new material. The general conclusion that emerges from these studies is that any manipulation (or elaboration) of material being studied tends to improve later recall, but the type of improvement is closely tied to the type of manipulation. In general, adjunct questions have a positive effect on posttest performance when the questions are directly repeated at posttest. Their effect on new questions at posttest is generally positive when the adjunct questions follow the passage, but is sometimes negative if the questions precede the passage. Anderson and Biddle (1975) point out that, although adjunct questions consistently have less influence on new than on repeated questions, the aggregate indirect benefit (reflected in the responses to new questions) is probably greater than the direct benefit, since only "the points of information about which adjunct questions are directly asked could be directly affected, whereas presumably every point in the text could be indirectly influenced" (p. 92). Similar results have been found for tasks that focus on particular aspects of a text by, for example, asking for the generation of topic sentences or headings (Dee-Lucas & di Vesta, 1980).

Studies of prose learning have required a variety of modes of response to adjunct questions. Summarizing across studies, Anderson and Biddle (1975) found that studies requiring short answer responses produced larger gains (in comparison with read-only control groups) than did studies requiring only multiple choice responses. These across-study comparisons were borne out by the few studies that have directly compared response modes (e.g., Anderson & Myrow, 1971; Roderick & Anderson, 1968). Similarly, studies that have compared overt (written) with covert (mental)

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responses have generally found that the overt responses led to better posttest performance (e.g., Michael & Maccoby, 1961).

One way of interpreting the findings on response modes is related to the amount of elaboration or manipulation they require from the reader: Overt responses require more active participation than covert responses, and short answers require more than multiple choice items. Such an interpretation is consistent with the results of other studies that have-looked directly at the effects of varying degrees of manipulation, elaboration, or "levels of processing" (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) on comprehension or recall (Barnett, di Vesta, & Rogozinski, 1981; di Vesta, Schultz, & Dangel, 1973; Frase, 1970, 1972; Schallert, 1976; Schwartz, 1980; Watts & Anderson, 1971). These studies assume that semantic processing reflects a deeper level than attention to surface features of text, and that the more intermediate steps required to answer a question, the greater the depth of semantic processing involved. In general, studies in this tradition have found that adjunct activities requiring greater depth of processing have stronger effects on comprehension and recall, although these effects may be attenuated if the task leads to selective focusing of attention on some parts of a passage to the exclusion of others.

A few studies have looked at the effects of notetaking, which requires more extensive writing than the other forms of adjunct activities. Early studies suggested that notetaking was more effective than read- or listen-only conditions, though results were dependent on the strategies adopted and on whether the notes were available for later review (di Vesta & Gray, 1972; Fisher & Harris, 1973; Schultz & di Vesta, 1972). Kulhavy, Dyer, and Silver (1975) compared notetaking and underlining conditions with a read-only control, for high school students studying an 845-word narrative passage. The notetaking group did better than the underlining group, and both did better than the read-only control. Notetakers also took more time to complete the study task, however, raising the possibility that the results are due to study time rather than to a depth of processing hypothesis.

In a later study, Bretzing and Kulhavy (1979) were explicitly concerned with a depth-of-processing hypothesis. Four levels of notetaking were used: (a) letter search (recording all words that began with a capital letter); (b) verbatim extraction of lines from the passage; (c) paraphrase (writing down main ideas as each page was read); and (d) summary (recording the main points after each page was read). A separate control group took no notes of any kind. For a sample of 180 high school students reading a 2,000 word passage about an African tribe, the paraphrase and summary conditions were superior, followed by the control group, followed by verbatim extraction and letter search. Since all notetaking groups spent more time on the study task than did the control, these results suggest it is the nature of the notetaking activity, not simply the additional time, that is the critical feature. Bretzing and Kulhavy (1981) replicated their finding that notetaking produced superior recall of idea units, and found further that particular idea units were more likely to be recalled if they had been included in an individual's notes than if they were not.

Bretzing and Kulhavy's summary and paraphrase conditions differed only slightly in the amount of manipulation of text material required to carry them out. Shimmerlik and Nolan (1976) examined the extent to which notetaking that reorganized information from a passage would be more beneficial than notetaking that reflected passage organization. In an initial experiment with high school students, they found that recall was higher for students who reorganized the material

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around categories presented by the experimenters. This effect persisted in a second study in which each group was presented with the category names.

Glover, Plake, Roberts, Zimmer, and Palmere (1981) compared recall scores after five study tasks that varied in the extent of interaction with readers' existing schemata. They found significant task effects both for number of idea units recalled from the text and for number of idea units added that were consistent with the original passage but not included in it (intrusions). In general, these effects were strongest for tasks that required readers to draw more extensively on their previous knowledge; paraphrase tasks led to better recall of passage information, while the tasks that required the reader to make logical extensions led to higher rates of consistent intrusions. Glover et al. interpret such intrusions as evidence of forming "new" knowledge through the interaction of text information with what the readers' already knew.

In a classroom study, Linden and Wittrock (1981) based their treatment conditions on Wittrock's (1974, 1981) model of generative learning. In this model, reading comprehension involves building relationships between the text and reader's background knowledge, and among the different parts of the text. Two treatment conditions asked students to generate different types of associations to three stories they were reading; a control group was given no instructions to generate associations; and a second control group was taught by the regular classroom teacher. The two generating treatment groups were asked on successive days to (a) draw pictures or images of the things happening in the story; (b) write summary sentences for three sections of the story; and (c) describe analogies and metaphors involving the story and their own experiences (first orally, then in writing). The two generating groups did better on completion tests of comprehension than did the two control treatments, though not on a parallel multiple choice test of fact retention. Within and across treatment groups, the number of items generated during the study conditions correlated positively and significantly with comprehension scores.

What do these studies imply for our concern with the effects of writing on learning? First, given a particular body of content, we might expect that the more a writer must manipulate new material in the process of writing about it, the better that writer will come to understand that material. This should be particularly true if understanding is measured by ability to apply new concepts in new situations, rather than to recognize material that has been previously presented.

Second, the studies suggest that the effects of interpolated activities, such as writing, are likely to be strongest for the particular information that the writing is focused on. If writing tasks differ in the extent to which they tap a wide or narrow band of new information, then they are likely to differ in the learning they promote. If our concern is with learning a general body of information (as reflected, for example, in measures of total recall), writing tasks that focus on a limited problem are unlikely to lead to general effects. Indeed, such tasks are likely to depress recall of information not written about, and improve recall of that which is elaborated in the writing.

Third, because writing tasks are likely to differ in the breadth of information drawn upon and in the depth of processing of that information, different types of writing tasks are likely to produce quite different effects on learning. Tasks that emphasize summarization or repetition (like those examined in the notetaking literature) are likely to lead to more general effects on recall of factual information

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than tasks that require extension or application to new areas. On the other hand, essay tasks that require the formulation of new relationships are likely to lead to better understanding of those relationships. Choice of tasks, then, becomes a question of emphasizing what counts as important within the subject matter being studied.

A few studies have examined the effects of writing on learning more directly. Newell (in press) used a within-subjects design to examine the effects of notetaking, short answer study questions, and analytic essay writing on passage recall, organization of passage-relevant knowledge, and ability to apply concepts in a new context. He found significant differences favoring essay writing using Langer's (1984) measure of organization of passage-relevant knowledge, but not on the other measures; essay writers also took more time to complete the study task.

Attempting to bridge the usual gap between process and product studies, Newell also used an adaptation of Flower and Hayes's (1980b) think-aloud procedures to examine what the students were doing in the various tasks. He argued that differing patterns in think-aloud protocols may reveal the underlying causes of the differing patterns of learning in the experimental conditions. Newell's data show very different patterns in composing processes in the three conditions, raising the possibility of eventually being able to relate specific features of a writer's behavior (e.g., amount of planning or amount of questioning) to specific types of learning effects.

Scardamalia and Bereiter (1981) have also examined the relationship between writing and thinking about a particular topic. They begin by noting that studies of the writing processes of novice writers suggest that their approaches to writing may actually hinder thought: The writing of young writers tends not to be sustained for any length, to involve little revision (and hence little rethinking), to lack overall coherence, and to lack any high level of critical examination of the ideas being presented. They posit that when writing does contribute to thought, it does so because of a dialectic set up between two problem spaces, one defined by the rhetorical problems of presenting a text, the other defined by the writer's topic knowledge and understanding. The data they report indicate that various kinds of procedural facilitation can be designed to enhance the underlying dialectic, leading to measurable changes in either the writing process or the writing product. These changes are inferred to reflect a more effective dialectic process, and in turn to reflect more thinking about the topic. Like the results from the process studies discussed earlier, however, these studies provide no independent measures of the understanding presumably gained through the experimental interventions.

A few studies have examined writing to learn in classroom settings. Tierney (1981), in a classroom study sponsored by the Bay Area Writing Project, compared two approaches to the teaching of high school biology. The experimental approach involved a wide variety of special writing activities: reading and learning logs, practice essays, end-of-class summary writing, and essay tests. The control group covered the same topics and did the same lab activities, but were asked to do very little writing. Two teachers were involved in the study, one teaching the experimental approach and the other using the more traditional control approach; half way through the year, treatments were reversed. Two units of biology material were chosen to assess the effectiveness of the two approaches, one each semester. Pre-, post-, and delayed posttesting consisted of a multiple choice exam covering the unit content. (This would seem to bias the results in favor of the control treatment,

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but may be a realistic choice reflecting the typical test format in biology classes.) The raw data show no difference between treatments at posttest, and perhaps some difference favoring the experimental group at the delayed posttest (16 weeks). Unfortunately, only raw means are reported, and the significance of the differences is not assessed. The study is more important for its examples of the ways in which writing activities can be incorporated into science classes than for any evidence as to whether these activities have any special value.

Weiss and Walters (1980) used a nonequivalent control groups design to study the effects of writing on learning of content in college reading, statistics, educational psychology, and physical science courses. For three of the four subjects studied, one class section served as an experimental group and a second section as a control; for the physical science course, a crossover design was used. As in Tierney's (1981) study, a wide variety of writing activities were used in the experimental classes, with content and nonwriting activities constant between experimental and control sections. Pre- and posttest measures included writing quality, subject knowledge (teacher made tests in each curriculum area), and writing apprehension. Although achievement differences favored the experimental group in all four cases, analyses of covariance indicated the differences were significant only for the statistics class. Differences in the other measures were not significant. Small n's, pretest differences between the treatment groups, and lack of control over the content of the posttests make it difficult to draw strong conclusions from this study. Like the Tierney study, it is more interesting for its application of writing activities to a variety of subject areas than for the strength of its findings.

Writing and Reasoning in School Contexts

If we turn from experimental studies of the effects of writing to studies that examine the status of writing and reasoning activities in American schools, the data are much clearer. We have reasonably extensive information about student achievement and about patterns of instruction.

Studies ofAchievement The most extensive data on student achievement come from the National

Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Across a variety of assessments, the results suggest that American schools are doing a reasonable job of teaching lower level skills; results from tasks requiring more complex reasoning skills, however, are much less encouraging. To illustrate this trend, we can consider a 1981 report, Reading, Thinking, and Writing (NAEP, 1981). This report is based on the assessment of reading and literature achievement; it is unusual in that it allows comparisons across a range of assessment tasks based on the same bodies of information. Students were given multiple choice questions about particular pas- sages, for example, and later asked to write about their interpretations. Results indicated that by age 17, most students were able to read a range of material appropriate for their age level, and to formulate and express their initial interpretations of that material. Unfortunately, as the report summarized the findings,

Students seem satisfied with their initial interpretations of what they have read and seem genuinely puzzled at requests to explain or defend their points of view. As a result, responses to assessment items requiring explanations of criteria, analysis of a text or defense of a judgment or point of view were in

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general disappointing. Few students could provide more than superficial responses to such tasks, and even the "better" responses showed little evidence of well-developed problem-solving strategies or critical-thinking skills. (p. 2)

Thus performance on multiple choice questions was reasonable, but when students were asked to write about what they knew-to reason-things began to fall apart. Results from assessments in other subject areas have been similar, with higher level skills suffering even as performance on more mechanical tasks reflects reasonable levels of achievement (Barrow, Mullis, & Phillips, 1982; Brown, 1981, 1982; Carpenter, Corbitt, Kepner, Lindquist, & Reys, 1981; NAEP, 1978).

Studies of Instruction

Studies of typical patterns of instruction in elementary and secondary schools suggest that these assessment results are an accurate reflection of what elementary and secondary schools are asking students to do; our schools may be very effective in teaching what they have set out to teach.

The National Study of Writing in the Secondary School, funded by the National Institute of Education, has been the most extensive recent examination of the contexts within which secondary school students are asked to write (Applebee, 1981, 1982, 1984). The National Study included case studies of individual schools, survey data on a random sample of schools nationally, analyses of popular textbooks, and longitudinal studies of the writing experiences of individual students. Analyses focused on the types of writing activities students were asked to undertake in each of the major secondary school subject areas, as well as on the kinds of knowledge and skills that these writing activities required.

In general, the study found that writing activities were limited in both scope and frequency. Although some 43% of observed class time was devoted to paper-and- pencil activities, the bulk of that time was spent in exercises that required students to record responses without composing text (similar in many ways to the activities reviewed in the adjunct questioning literature). Only about 3% of students' time, for classwork or for homework, was spent on writing of paragraph length or longer. When students did write at greater length, it tended to be in an examination context; here the emphasis was on the accuracy of previous learning, rather than on reasoned exploration of new ideas or experiences. Looking across subject areas and grade levels, Applebee (1982) summarized the types of knowledge stressed in the writing experiences of American school children:

1) Language skills at the word and sentence levels. 2) Routine recital of previously organized subject-area information. 3) Knowledge of how to relate to an audience whose body of relevant information is both larger and better articulated than the writer's own. (p. 378)

Conversely, the types of knowledge that might be stressed but that are typically (though not necessarily intentionally) downplayed included

1) Language skills at the text level, including metacognitive strategies for monitoring and revising the evolving text. 2) Heuristic activity in which subject-area knowledge is examined and extended.

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3) Knowledge of how to assess and then extend a reader's relevant knowledge. (p. 378)

In the context of our present concern with reasoning and higher order thinking, such emphases may seem surprising. To understand their sources, Applebee and Langer have been carrying out a series of case studies of teachers who have been making a conscious effort to incorporate writing in a variety of academic disciplines.' Results from these studies suggest that current emphases are less the result of a conscious choice about what is important than of a complex interaction of other influences on curriculum (see Langer, in press): (a) a model of instruction that defines learning in terms of knowledge to be transmitted, with frequent testing to assess the success of the transmission process; (b) demands for coverage of content in an increasingly overcrowded curriculum; (c) lack of clarity about the value of extended writing experiences as part of the process of mastering the various academic disciplines (Is learning to write scientific discourse part of the process of science, or simply the utilization of a generic "writing skill" in the context of the science class?); and (d) lack of models of how writing activities that require more extended reasoning processes can be embedded within the curriculum.

The National Study focused on instruction at the secondary school level, but results from studies of elementary school programs are very similar (Graves, 1978; Petty & Finn, 1981). Students do little extended writing, and when they do, it tends to involve a process of recitation rather than reasoning.

Conclusion

So, where does this leave us? The nature of the relationship between writing and reasoning has been one of the unexamined assumptions in the study of writing instruction. At one level, most authors begin with the assumption that writing about a topic helps us to understand that topic better. At another level, we know almost nothing about the nature of the understanding that develops, and have to look to research in other fields to find any evidence that writing fosters understanding at all. The debate about the effects to be expected from writing goes back to the beginnings of written language as we know it, when Plato argued against the corruption of mind that would follow inevitably from relying on books, instead of on the discipline of mind, for our knowledge and wisdom. Aristotle, on the other hand, offered us an extensive, and still useful, inventory of procedures for thinking about and developing an argument.

The research that does exist in this area suggests a broad agenda for future work in each of the three areas I have examined: the cultural effects of literacy, the effects of particular writing experiences on individual learning, and the role of writing in the development of reasoning skills in school contexts.

Cultural Effects of Literacy The work in this area highlights the need for studies of the role of particular

types of literacy events within particular cultural contexts. It is not enough to ask whether a society or social group is literate, or even how salient literacy-related

'These studies are supported by the National Institute of Education, Grant Number NIE- G-82-0027. A. N. Applebee & J. A. Langer, Moving toward excellence: Writing and learning in the high school curriculum. Stanford, CA: Stanford University School of Education.

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events are in the day-to-day lives of its members. Of much more interest, from our present perspective, is the set of cultural functions that writing fulfills. Knowledge of these functions will help us understand the cultural effects of written language in its interaction with higher order thinking. Such knowledge is also most likely to help us understand the influences at work as various cultural groups encounter the values and assumptions embedded in our notions of schooling.

Individual Effects We have yet to develop a convincing research base for the argument that writing

activities can make a significant contribution to the development of higher level reasoning skills. There have been few studies that have directly addressed this question, and the related literature suggests that, to the extent that writing is related to reasoning, the relationships will be complex rather than straightforward. Progress in this research seems to require two changes in our current paradigms. First, we must shift from a general focus on the effects of writing toward a more rigorous conceptualization of the functions that writing can serve, each of which might be expected to have a different relationship to the development of reasoning skills. (This shift is equivalent to that needed in the intercultural studies of the effects of literacy). Second, we must develop models of writing that more explicitly take account of topic knowledge and of the interaction between the writing process and the goals of the writing event. The separation of process and product, though perhaps a needed step in the development of our research, seems now to be a major stumbling block to further progress.

The Process of Schooling Studies of the nature of instruction make it clear that school writing tasks are,

on the whole, extremely limited and unrewarding. Although simply increasing the amount of writing that students are expected to do would seem worthwhile, it is unclear that this would necessarily lead to a major change in the types of knowledge-and the levels of reasoning-that are important. Writing activities take their shape from the general context of schooling in which they are embedded, and changes in that context are unlikely to come easily or swiftly. Here we need studies that begin to explore the interactions between writing activities and the goals and constraints in individual classrooms. To what extent can writing activities be used to further teachers' instructional aims? To what extent must those aims themselves be revised if higher order thinking tasks are to be seen as relevant and important? Are we even dealing with a question of pedagogy at all, or simply working our way toward a confrontation about the aims and purposes of education in a democratic society?

Questions such as these bring us full circle to the questions of educational policy that framed the opening of this review. As a group, those questions are unanswerable given the current state of knowledge about the relationship between writing and reasoning. We cannot be sure that further attention to writing skills will contribute to the education of a more rational, more thoughtful group of high school graduates. Nor can we be sure that embedding more writing activities in the various high school subjects will lead to better understanding of those subjects. The research evidence that is available is consistent with these notions, however, even if it does not yet compel one to accept them. More important, the studies so far make it

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clear that simple policy prescriptions are unlikely to be effective: Writing serves many functions in our culture, and those functions are likely to interact in complex ways with the nature of school learning. Until we understand those interactions better, simple suggestions for educational change are unlikely to lead to major changes in the success of our schools.

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AUTHOR ARTHUR N. APPLEBEE, Associate Professor, School of Education, Stanford

University, Stanford, CA 94305. Specializations: Language and learning, writing instruction, teaching of English.

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