The Writing Effect

The research on writing (even if it’s called something else) reveals that it can provide a powerful boost to learning—and might even underestimate its potential.

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Researchers have focused much less on writing than reading, even though our writing crisis is worse than our reading crisis. Only about a quarter of students test at the proficient level or above on national writing tests. In reading, about a third meet that bar.

But writing isn’t just a vital skill. It’s also, potentially, a way of enabling students to retain and understand what they’re learning. And there has been some research, under the heading of “write to learn” studies, indicating that writing generally has a small positive effect on learning. But the data can go both ways.

For instance, a 2020 meta-analysis of 56 write-to-learn studies found that writing “reliably enhanced learning” in science, social studies, and math, across all grade levels. The “effect size” was 0.30, which is generally considered moderate—but in the education context, where it’s difficult to move the needle, it would be considered large. But 18 percent of the studies found a negative effect, meaning that writing decreased learning. The researchers weren’t sure what the explanation was.

At the same time, there’s quite a bit of research on learning that—if you look under the hood—actually involves writing. These studies are generally conducted by cognitive psychologists rather than researchers who focus on writing, and they don’t generally highlight the fact that writing is involved.

Retrieval Practice, Elaboration, and Writing

One learning strategy backed by a strong body of evidence from cognitive science is retrieval practice, which involves trying to recall information that we have in long-term memory but may have slightly forgotten. The more we try to retrieve an item of information, the more likely we are to be able to retrieve it in the future. That’s hugely helpful to learning because, as cognitive scientists have found, it’s much easier to acquire new knowledge if we can connect it to knowledge we already have.

Retrieval practice is often associated with quizzing or testing—in fact, it used to be called “the testing effect.” And many studies do show that low-stakes, frequent testing is one effective way of engaging in retrieval practice. But that’s not the kind of retrieval practice used in the iconic study in the area, which is sometimes called the “free recall” study.

Participants—who were college students—were told to read an article, put it aside, and then write down everything they could remember from it. So it was partly a writing study, even though no one calls it that. Based on this study, at least, the “testing effect” might also be considered the “writing effect.”

Another line of cognitive research focuses on the effect of elaboration, which includes things like generating examples of a concept or coming up with “how” and “why” questions. While retrieval practice has generally been found to improve retention of information, elaboration has generally been found to improve comprehension.

As with retrieval practice, there are different ways to engage in elaboration, not all of which involve writing. But clearly, writing often does involve elaboration, especially if students are not just writing down what they can recall but composing an analytical paragraph or essay.

A recent study that involved retrieval practice and elaboration—and writing—found that combining retrieval practice and elaboration improved both retention and comprehension. The surprise was that elaboration alone—even if it didn’t involve retrieval practice—provided almost the same benefits as the combination of the two.

That suggests that teachers don’t have to ensure that students close the book (or screen, or whatever) to get the benefits of retrieval practice. If you have them write about a text while they have access to it, they’ll still get a boost in retention—and, especially if they’re asked to engage in elaboration in their writing, to comprehension as well.

Like the free recall study, this study wasn’t billed as a writing experiment. But it seems to provide strong support for using writing as a way to enhance learning.

Writing Is Hard

But there’s a caveat to all these studies, including the ones that explicitly focus on writing: writing imposes an extremely heavy burden on working memory. In other words, it’s really hard—especially if you’re an inexperienced writer. If the burden is too heavy, writers may not have enough capacity in working memory to retain or understand the content they’re writing about.

The researchers who did the free-recall study with college students also conducted a follow-up experiment with fourth-graders. As I discussed in a previous post, they got very different results. The college students were able to recall 64 percent of the concepts they had read about, but the kids could recall only 7 percent.

The results suggested, the researchers wrote, that elementary students need much more support to reap the benefits of retrieval practice. And in fact, when they provided that support—by, for example, requiring less writing—the children’s ability to recall concepts improved greatly.

That may explain why the write-to-learn studies, which seem to be conducted mostly with K-12 students rather than undergraduates, show such mixed results. If students are struggling with tasks like spelling, choosing vocabulary, and organizing their thoughts, writing might have no effect on their learning—or even a negative one.

Some support for that hypothesis comes from a meta-analysis that found students were less likely to experience learning benefits when writing assignments were longer. If writing is hard, writing at length only makes it harder.

What all of this adds up to is that writing seems to have enormous potential power to enhance learning, but only if the heavy cognitive load it imposes is modulated. For most students, including many at higher grade levels, one effective way to modulate that load is to explictly teach them how to craft sentences and create clear linear outlines for paragraphs and essays. In addition, writing activities should be embedded in the content of the core curriculum as much as possible, so that they reinforce the knowledge we want students to retain.

Unfortunately, typical writing instruction doesn’t look like that. Even kindergartners are expected to write at length, without much guidance. And writing activities are often divorced from curriculum content.

Unlocking the Power of Writing

The good news is that there is at least one method that can unlock the potential of writing instruction—The Writing Revolution. It’s the name of a book describing the method, of which I am co-author (although the method was created by my co-author, Judith Hochman), and it’s the name of an organization that provides training.

So far there’s limited research on the method, but it’s promising. And based on what I’ve seen in classrooms and heard from teachers, when it’s combined with a curriculum that’s rich in content, great things can happen—for writing ability, reading comprehension, and learning in general.

It would help to have a clearer sense of what the research actually says about the potential of writing to boost learning. The cognitive science studies that involve writing may be overlooked by researchers and practitioners who focus on writing because they’re not considered “writing” studies. That’s only one of many negative consequences of an artificial distinction between the science of learning and the science of literacy. Reading and writing are in fact inextricably linked to learning.

We also need better data on the ways in which the difficulty of writing can interfere with its potential to boost learning. The write-to-learn studies don’t seem to take that into account. If writing were made more manageable for students, we might not see those puzzling negative effects—and the overall positive effect of writing-to-learn might be significantly higher.