Writing-to-Learn Assignments in Introductory Psychology

Abstract

Students completed brief, ungraded writing assignments in several introductory psychology classes across two semesters. The assignments varied across classes with respect to type of assignment (reflective vs. generic writing) and choice of topics (student selected from specified list vs. assigned topics from list). Students performed significantly better on exam questions relating to the content of the writing assignments than to unrelated content. Writing benefits extended across both type of writing assignment and choice of topics. The results suggest that writing-to-learn assignments can bolster learning effects without adding undue burdens on instructors seeking to integrate writing-across-the curriculum objectives, even in larger introductory psychology courses.

Keywords

journaling writing-to-learn learning benefits writing assignments

Instructors can use writing-to-learn assignments to encourage deeper processing and enhance learning. Unlike traditional term papers and other high-stakes “writing-to-earn” assignments, writing-to-learn assignments are typically low-stakes writing exercises that instructors do not grade or correct but which allow students to earn credit toward their grades. They are used as a process for students to clarify and expand their knowledge of course-related concepts rather than as a means of evaluating student performance (McDermott, 2010). Consequently, writing-to-learn assignments may reduce writing anxiety associated with graded term papers. Writing-to-learn assignments may be especially valuable to instructors of larger sections interested in meeting writing-across-the-curriculum objectives, as they impose much less burdensome responsibilities than traditional term papers.

Instructors may also use writing-to-learn assignments as active learning exercises designed to foster critical thinking (Angelo, 1995; Dunn & Smith, 2008; Wade, 1995). Writing assignments can vary based on the instructions given to students. For example, personal reflection writing is a type of writing-to-learn activity in which a student writes about how a certain topic relates to his or her life, which may encourage students to engage the content more deeply and make connections between personal experiences and the classroom (Blake, 2005; Mills, 2008; O’Connell & Dyment, 2006). Other types of writing-to-learn assignments include the synthesis of ideas from several reading assignments, development of solutions for real-world problems, and discussion of interesting topics.

Prior research supports the learning benefits of both brief in-class writing assignments (Drabick, Weisberg, Paul, & Bubier, 2007; Stewart, Myers, & Culley, 2010) and writing assignments completed outside of class (Christopher & Walter, 2006; Connor-Greene, 2000; Marek, Christopher, Koenig, & Reinhart, 2005). Connor-Greene (2000) and Christopher and Walter (2006) found that students who completed writing assignments outside of class performed better on course exams than students in comparable courses without writing assignments. Additionally, Marek and colleagues (2005) found that students who wrote a paper on a particular topic not discussed in class answered a related exam question at a level comparable to their performance on other exam questions based on topics discussed in class. However, the investigators did not compare performance on exam questions related to the writing assignments to those involving unrelated content to determine if writing boosted exam performance. Moreover, the types of writing assignments in these previous studies varied considerably. Connor-Greene instructed students to briefly apply theoretical concepts to personal experiences, whereas Christopher and Walter instructed students to answer specific questions about statistics and research methods. Marek et al. instructed students to read research articles and write a paper on one particular topic. Thus, it is difficult to determine what aspects of the writing assignments influenced exam performance.

Overall, reviews of the learning benefits of writing in the service of learning tend to show only small positive effects (Bangert-Drowns, Hurley, & Wilkinson, 2004; Klein, 1999). The educational advantages of writing-to-learn assignments may be enhanced, however, using prompts to structure writing assignments, such as by linking concepts to personal examples or by using questions that guide students to engage in deeper processing of material (Hübner, Nückles, & Renkl, 2006, 2010; Papadopoulos, Demetriadis, Stamelos, & Tsoukalas, 2011).

The present study expands upon prior research by examining whether the learning benefits of writing-to-learn assignments are affected by the type of writing assignment (i.e., personal reflection vs. generic) and choice of topics (i.e., assigned vs. selected from a list of possible topics). To enhance applicability to classroom use, the instructor integrated writing-to-learn assignments in regularly scheduled classes in introductory psychology.

Method

Procedure

Three introductory psychology classes at a large, northeastern, metropolitan university incorporated writing assignments as course requirements across two semesters. The same instructor (JSN) taught all classes and used the same introductory psychology textbook. The class roster across the three classes consisted of 208 students (122 women, 86 men; 96 freshmen, 58 sophomores, 38 juniors, and 16 seniors).

Students were required to submit 16 brief writing assignments of one to two paragraphs each in length during the course of the semester. Each writing assignment related to a particular concept or topic from a corresponding chapter of the textbook. Students wrote on one particular psychological concept from each text chapter and then uploaded their writing assignments to an electronic filing cabinet on the course management system (Blackboard). Students were unable to view each other’s submissions. In total, the writing assignments constituted 10% of the student’s final grade. Students received credit if the assignment was at least one paragraph in length and focused on the designated topic, but students did not receive grades for these assignments.

Study 1

In Study 1, we compared, respectively, two different writing assignments, a generic writing assignment and a personal reflection writing assignment, in two classes in introductory psychology. The instructor gave both classes the same list of key concepts for the course (average of 10 concepts per chapter) and instructed students to select and write about one concept from the list for each of the 16 chapters, for a total of 16 writing assignments. For example, in the chapter on adolescent and adult development, the list included the following concepts: identity crisis, ego identity, crystallized vs. fluid intelligence, emerging adulthood, midlife crisis, and so on.

The instructor provided two different prompts to structure the writing assignments. For one class (generic writing condition), the instructor required students to submit writing assignments describing what they had learned about a particular concept that they have not known before (“What I learned from the concept of ______ is that . . . ”). For the other class (personal reflection writing condition), the instructor required students to reflect about a real-life example of the concepts they wrote about (e.g., “An example of the concept of ______ in my life is . . . ”).

Course exams included test items assessing knowledge of concepts matched to those each particular student wrote about and unmatched (control) concepts unrelated to the student's writings. Because students only wrote about one concept for each of the 16 chapters, each student had 16 matched questions across the three tests (as compared to 195 unmatched questions). The dependent measure was exam performance on matched and unmatched content aggregated across three, noncumulative, multiple-choice exams.

Prior to the analysis, we excluded data from students who did not complete all three exams (e.g., students who withdrew before the course was completed) or who did not complete any of the writing assignments. The 18 excluded students across the two classes did not differ from the remaining students with respect to gender or year in school. The remaining data set included exam performance of 135 students, 80 in the personal reflection condition and 55 in the generic condition. Preliminary analysis of the remaining data set (N = 135) showed significant skewness and violations of assumptions of normality. Consequently, we applied an arcsine transformation to the proportions of matched and unmatched questions answered correctly, which succeeded in normalizing the data.

We performed a 2 × 2 repeated-measures analysis of variance on the transformed scores, finding a main effect for question type (matched vs. unmatched questions), F(1, 133) = 41.90, p < .01, that showed students performing significantly better on matched than unmatched questions (see Table 1). There was no significant interaction between class (generic vs. personal reflection) and question type, F(1, 133) = 0.38, p = .54, indicating that the prompt did not influence exam performance. The effect sizes for question type were in the medium range for both classes: d = 0.63, 95% CI [0.31, 0.95] in the personal reflection class and d = 0.68, 95% CI [0.29, 1.06] in the generic writing class. Although these data provide initial support for the learning benefits of writing assignments, it is possible that students self-selected topics with which they were already familiar. We performed Study 2 during the following semester to control for self-selection of topic.

Table 1.

Proportion Correct on Course Exams as a Function of Type of Brief Writing Assignment

	Study 1				Study 2
	Class 1 (Reflective, Self-Selected Topic)		Class 2 (Generic, Self-Selected Topic)		Class 3 (Choice of Generic or Reflective Writing, Assigned Topic)
	M	SD	M	SD	M	SD
Matched questions	68.39	19.96	66.07	27.08	63.70	15.59
Unmatched (control) questions	58.61	13.02	54.10	12.05	57.56	10.94

Study 2

We conducted Study 2 in the context of an introductory psychology class comprising 55 students the following semester and which included the same instructor, textbook, and exams. The study was a systematic replication of Study 1, which differed in two ways from the first study. First, students were free to choose either style of writing, generic or reflective, for each submitted assignment. Second, the instructor assigned students to write about particular topics using a quasi-random procedure based on alphabetical order of student surnames. We assigned students one topic per chapter from the same list used in Study 1. We gave students the following prompt for the writing assignment: “Each journal entry should be one- to two paragraphs and consist of either (a) a real-life example of the concept or topic you are asked to write about (e.g., ‘An example of the concept of _________ in my life is . . . ’) or (b) what you learned about the topic that you hadn’t known before.” We also examined relationships between length of submitted writing assignments and proportion of matched questions that students answered correctly on course exams.

We dropped one student from the analysis because she had incomplete data due to withdrawal from the class. Preliminary analysis showed that the data met assumptions of normality and homogeneity of variance. Paired t test analysis comparing the proportion of correct answers on matched versus unmatched questions showed a significant effect, t(53) = −3.06, p < .01. The effect size for the differences in proportion of correct answers was in the medium range, d = 0.45, 95% CI [0.07, 0.83], indicating that students performed better on test items corresponding to material they had written about (see Table 1). The length of writing assignments, which averaged 97 words (SD = 38.68), was significantly related to both total exam performance across the three exams, r(53) = .28, p < .05, and performance on unmatched items, r(53) = .29, p < .05, but was unrelated to performance on matched items, r(53) = .14, p > .05. Thus, length of the assignments did not appear to be related to the learning benefits of writing about a topic.

Discussion

The present study supports previous findings demonstrating the learning benefits of brief writing assignments (Christopher & Walter, 2006; Connor-Greene, 2000; Drabick et al., 2007; Marek et al., 2005; Stewart et al., 2010) and shows the robustness of these learning benefits across both type of writing assignment (generic and reflective writing) and for assigned versus student-selected topics. Students performed significantly better on course examination questions testing knowledge of concepts linked to writing assignments than those measuring knowledge of unrelated content.

Learning benefits occurred whether or not students wrote about personal examples of the concepts in their lives (reflective writing) or about what they had learned about the concept they have not known before (generic writing). These results suggest that learning benefits of brief, topical writing assignments may hinge on the rehearsal and deeper processing of concepts through the process of writing itself, rather than the personal relevance of concepts or connections between concepts and personal experiences.

The length of writing submissions as measured by word counts showed no relationship with knowledge of matched concepts but was related to overall test performance and knowledge of unrelated concepts. These findings may reflect a tendency for better students to invest greater effort in their writing assignments. The lack of this relationship for matched questions may indicate that writing assignments that are limited to a paragraph or two may boost content acquisition of key concepts regardless of their actual length.

The present study has several limitations. First, the same instructor taught all the courses and used the same textbook and exams. Although this arrangement helped standardize the instructional methods and materials across classes, the findings may not generalize to classes taught by other instructors or which use other instructional materials. Second, we did not randomly assign students to classes, so classes cannot be considered equivalent groups. However, the comparisons of interest examined the performance of the same students on related and unrelated exam content. The results also demonstrate that the learning benefits of writing assignments were robust with respect to differences in type of writing and to whether students had a choice of topics to write about. Third, the study presents only a limited basis of comparison between reflective and generic writing—limited to the use of brief, supplemental writing assignments to enhance acquisition of basic knowledge of concepts. It remains to be seen whether other means of making personal connections to course material leads to more enduring memories or enhances ability to apply concepts to life situations. Another avenue of future research might explore whether there are added benefits of sequencing reflective and generic writing assignments over the course of the semester. Additionally, because the educational objectives of all classes required a writing assignment, we used a within-subjects control comparing student performance on matched and unmatched test questions. Future research would benefit from use of an additional no-writing control comparison. Moreover, the processes involved in explaining learning benefits of writing-to-learn assignments should be more fully explored in future research. It is conceivable that the benefits are due to the additional time and effort spent on the writing assignment, or elaborative rehearsal of the material, rather than to the writing itself.

In sum, writing-to-learn assignments may be of value to course instructors seeking to incorporate brief, ungraded writing assignments to boost student performance on related content on exams. Additionally, writing-to-learn assignments may enable instructors to integrate writing-across-the-curriculum objectives without incurring the heavy burdens associated with grading and correcting traditional term papers.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References

Angelo

T. A.

(1995). Classroom assessment for critical thinking. Teaching of Psychology, 22, 6–7.

Bangert-Drowns

R. L.

Hurley

M. M.

Wilkinson

(2004). The effects of school-based writing-to-learn interventions on academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 74, 29–58.

Blake

T. K.

(2005). Journaling: An active learning technique. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 2, 1–13.

Christopher

A. N.

Walter

M. I.

(2006). An assignment to help students learn to navigate primary sources of information. Teaching of Psychology, 33, 42–44.

Connor-Greene

P. A.

(2000). Making connections: Evaluating the effectiveness of journal writing in enhancing students learning. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 44–46.

Drabick

D. A. G.

Weisberg

Paul

Bubier

J. L.

(2007). Keeping it short and sweet: Brief, ungraded writing assignments facilitate learning. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 172–176.

Dunn

D. S.

Smith

R. A.

(2008). Writing as critical thinking. In Dunn

D. S.

Halonen

J. S.

Smith

R. A.

(Eds.), Teaching critical thinking in psychology: A handbook of best practices (pp. 164–173). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hübner

Nückles

Renkl

(2006). Prompting cognitive and metacognitive processing in writing-to-learn enhances learning outcomes. In Sun

Miyake

Schunn

(Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 357–362). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hübner

Nückles

Renkl

(2010). Writing learning journals: Instructional support to overcome learning-strategy deficits. Learning and Instruction, 20, 18–29.

10.

Klein

P. D.

(1999). Reopening inquiry into cognitive processes in writing-to-learn. Educational Psychology Review, 11, 203–270.

11.

Marek

Christopher

A. N.

Koenig

C. S.

Reinhart

D. F.

(2005). Writing exercises for introductory psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 32, 244–246.

12.

McDermott

(2010). More than writing-to-learn. Science Teacher, 77, 32–36.

13.

Mills

(2008). ‘It's just a nuisance': Improving college student reflective journal writing. College Student Journal, 42, 684–690.

14.

O’Connell

Dyment

(2006). Reflections on using journals in higher education: A focus group discussion with faculty. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31, 671–691.

15.

Papadopoulos

P. M.

Demetriadis

S. N.

Stamelos

I. O.

Tsoukalas

I. A.

(2011). The value of writing-to-learn when using question prompts to support web-based learning in ill-structured domains. Educational Technology Research and Development, 59, 71–90.

16.

Stewart

T. L.

Myers

A. C.

Culley

M. R.

(2010). Enhanced learning and retention through “writing to learn” in the psychology classroom. Teaching of Psychology, 37, 46–49.

17.

Wade

(1995). Using writing to develop and assess critical thinking. Teaching of Psychology, 22, 24–28.