In this design study, we designed an instructional unit open to contextual modifications with the aim of fostering secondary school students' philosophical writing. Three philosophy teachers developed innovative source-based writing tasks and provided discipline-specific writing strategy instruction in their 10th grade class. In this study, we focused on change. We explored teachers' interaction with the instructional design and studied teachers' views on how the intervention had changed their practice since a change of beliefs is crucial to successful, durable innovation of teaching. Moreover, we studied the effects of the changed practice, by exploring change in students' writing. An external jury analyzed students' texts to determine students' actual learning achievements. Teachers' insights into student progress were obtained from reflective interviews that featured comparisons between the observed and expected results. The results showed that teachers judged the design to be feasible, valid, and effective for students' philosophical writing development. After the intervention, students' texts showed similar or even more independent philosophical thinking than before, while the tasks became more complex. Implementation drove teachers to contemplate writing instruction, indicating a change in their belief system, which is necessary for genuine improvement in teacher practice.

Within the sociocultural theory of writing, texts are seen to result from cultural and social practices that affect the structure, content, and production of them in different knowledge communities. Accordingly, writing is not the same across subjects or contexts. Focusing on writing in subjects other than Language arts, this special contributes to understanding subject-specific writing involving both discipline specific knowledge, knowledge of representation, and production of knowledge in different, subject specific writing contexts. The issue advocates that disciplinary writing can start at an early age in primary school, that students have a range of preparedness for it, and that writing skills can be developed to support the learning objectives of the subject. The introduction considers the perspectives of writing to learn and learning to write as the underpinnings of writing across and in subjects. Consequently, the studies in the issue are related to these perspectives. The content areas scrutinized are Craft Education, Civics, Environmental studies, Science and Science orientation. This issue reflects the multifaceted, contextual, and hybrid forms writing can take, and, how writing can support learning in changing contexts and with different contents.

Students need support through intentional writing instruction to develop their discipline-specific writing skills outside of Language Arts. Yet, we argue not all writing instruction provides the same opportunities for student learning. In this study, with the support of professional development, teachers engaged students in civic perspective-taking through writing, focusing on locally relevant public issues. Drawing from disciplinary literacy and genre pedagogy, our research team conducted a descriptive study where thematic analysis was applied to examine second and third graders’ civics writing samples. Our findings indicate that students’ engagement with key civic concepts became more complex and purposeful as they practiced argumentative writing. Development continued from second to third grade in both the sophistication of their civic perspective-taking as well as their writing. Additionally, we found that student motivation to engage in argumentative writing increased in all classrooms across both grade levels when engaging with locally relevant public issues. This article provides details about the elementary civics writing curriculum and the students’ writing outcomes as well as includes the two graphic organizers used in the curriculum.

In 1966, more than 50 scholars from the UK, US, and Canada convened at Dartmouth College to discuss the state of the profession of English teaching, ultimately proposing a “growth” model of language learning which contrasted with the skills-based models of curriculum sequencing prevalent at the time. While debates about the impact of the 1966 Dartmouth conference on the teaching of English continue to ebb and flow, from contrasting early accounts by seminar participants (Muller, 1967; Dixon, 1969) to more modern work which situates the conference as a harbinger of the process movement (Trimbur, 2008) or Writing Across the Curriculum (Palmquist et al., 2020), its continued provocation of scholarly discussion has become a legacy in its own right. Even if the Dartmouth Seminar didn't change anything happening in the classrooms of its era and thereafter, which is unlikely (Harris, 1991), it would remain a rare moment of international, professional collaboration and consideration virtually unparalleled in our field's history.

Teaching the craft of written science communication is an arduous task that requires familiarity with disciplinary writing conventions. With the burgeoning of technological advancements, practitioners preparing novice research writers can begin to augment teaching and learning with activities in digital writing environments attuned to the conventions of scientific writing in the disciplines. The Research Writing Tutor (RWT) is one such technology. Grounded in an integrative theoretical framework, it was designed to help students acquire knowledge about the research article genre and develop research writing competence. One of its modules was designed to facilitate revision by providing different forms of automated feedback and scaffolding that are genre-based and discipline-specific. This study explores whether and how the features of the RWT may impact revision while using this module of the tool. Drawing from cognitive writing modeling, this study investigates the behaviors of a multidisciplinary group of 11 graduate-student writers by exploring how they interacted with the RWT's features and how this interaction may create conditions for enhanced revision processes and text modifications. Findings demonstrate promising potential for the use of this automated feedback tool in fostering writers' metacognitive processing during revision. This research adds to theory on cognitive writing models by acknowledging the evolving role of digital environments in writing practices and offering insights into future development of automated tools for genre-based writing instruction.

In this paper, we provide a mental-chronometry measurement (reaction time, RT) and a mathematical model to support the hypothesis that writing increases long-term memory (LTM) consolidation. Twenty-five subjects read short passages, wrote or spoke summaries of the texts, and performed a word-recognition episodic memory task. In the recognition task, participants responded faster in the written condition than in the spoken condition. We fit 15 drift-diffusion models to the accuracy and RT data to explore which components of the memory retrieval process reflect the learning effect of writing. Model selection methods showed that the nondecision parameter accounts for this effect, suggesting that initial stages of learning through writing are associated with fast episodic-memory retrieval. We suggest that the current approach could be used as a tool to compare different models of writing to learn. Furthermore, we show how combining mental chronometry, evidence-accumulation models of behavioral data, and dynamic causal models of functional magnetic resonance imaging could further the goal of understanding how writing affects learning. With a broader perspective, this approach provides a feasible experimental link between the field of writing to learn and the cognitive neurosciences.

The present book addresses strategy-focused instruction in writing.This type of instruction proposes a global package of content and components, which together have shown effects in improving writing competence in children.Strategy instruction has been proven to be one of the most effective teaching practices for improving writing skills, as well as writing to learn in different content domains.The book starts with an introduction by the editors about the importance of strategy-focused instruction to promote writing in the school context, both as a content and as a learning tool.This book has a total of 12 chapters, divided in four sections.The first section includes an introduction and three chapters that approach writing instruction from different perspectives.The second section presents well-validated intervention programs for learning to write.This section includes two chapters presenting two specific instructional programs that can be used with full-range students in classrooms, across different educational contexts.The third part is composed of three chapters that address instructional programs focused on writing-to-learn.Finally, the fourth section includes the conclusion, as well as three chapters that discuss the strategy-instruction models presented in the previous sections.

This article discusses five trends in research on writing as a learning activity. Firstly, earlier decades were marked by conflicting views about the effects of writing on learning; in the past decade, the use of meta-analysis has shown that the effects of writing on learning are reliable, and that several variables mediate and moderate these effects. Secondly, in earlier decades, it was thought that text as a medium inherently elicited thinking and learning. Research during the past decade has indicated that writing to learn is a self-regulated activity, dependent on the goals and strategies of the writer. Thirdly, the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement emphasized domain-general approaches to WTL. Much recent research is consistent with the Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movement, incorporating genres that embody forms of reasoning specific to a given discipline. Fourthly, WTL as a classroom practice was always partially social, but the theoretical conceptualization of it was largely individual. During the past two decades, WTL has broadened to include theories and research that integrate social and psychological processes. Fifthly, WTL research has traditionally focused on epistemic learning in schools; more recently, it has been extended to include reflective learning in the professions and additional kinds of outcomes.

Research on writing to learn is conceptually rich and pedagogically important. This special issue contributes to our growing knowledge about the variables that mediate and moderate the effects of writing on learning. One group of studies addresses individual writing; it adds to the growing evidence for the effects of several moderators, including cognitive, metacognitive, and personal utility prompts in journal writing (Wäschle et al.); and discipline-specific prompts for argument writing (Van Drie et al.). The individual-level studies also suggest moderator roles for discipline-general strategies of argumentation (Smirnova); and open-ended informational writing assignments (Wilcox et al.). Additionally, the Wäschle et al. study provides the strongest evidence for a specific sequence of mediation: Prompted journal writing to comprehension to interest to critical reflection. The second set of articles focusses on collaborative writing (Corcelles & Castelló; Ortoleva and Bétrancourt). It suggests moderating roles for discipline-specific analytic strategies, and peer interaction; and suggests mediating roles for exploratory discourse and group regulation. Further experimental research on collaborative writing is needed to conclusively test hypotheses about specific mediator and moderator variables. The studies in this special issue, like many recent studies, are incommensurable with some influential theories of writing to learn. Rather, individual and collaborative studies converge to suggest that writing to learn may be conceptualized as a guided process of cognition and self-regulation.

This paper is a response to an invitation from the editors of the special issue to comment on the ingredients of effective writing to learn interventions as reflected in the contributions to the special issue. The six papers in the issue vary widely in approach and underlying theoretical frameworks but share the broad common theme of writing to learn. Within this, they vary along three main dimensions: (i) how learning is defined and assessed, and in particular whether they assess effects of the writing intervention on content knowledge; (ii) related to this, whether they are primarily focussed on discipline specific skills or on more general effects of writing; and (iii) whether they are designed to carry out a controlled evaluation of the writing intervention or rather are concerned with describing the design and purpose of a specific intervention. In what follows, I will first consider the general characteristics of the papers in relation to these three dimensions. I will then reflect on the findings of the individual papers, and then conclude by relating the papers to my personal understanding of writing to learn in terms of a dual-process model of writing.

Writing can be a tool for communicating and learning in content area subjects. This pretest-posttest quasi-experiment examined the effects of instruction in a content area writing framework on students' text quality and ability to use writing to learn. It also examined the effects of possible moderator variables (gender, previous writing achievement) and mediator variables (genre knowledge, approach to writing). A multilevel analysis was conducted with students nested within classes. Instruction significantly increased argument genre knowledge and explanation text quality, but not argument text quality, explanation genre knowledge, or learning during writing. Gender predicted previous writing achievement and posttest argument text quality, but did not interact significantly with instruction. Previous writing achievement strongly affected several posttest measures, but did not interact significantly with instruction. A path analysis supported the theory that instruction affects genre knowledge, which affects text quality, which predicts learning during writing.