Writing-to-Learn activities are less formal, lower-stakes writing tasks that help students process important information in a subject. These writing tasks can be as brief as a 10-minute annotation exercise to a more in-depth problem-solving task. The unifying purpose of WTL is the focus on using writing activities to help students learn foundational concepts. At the same time, WTL helps instructors to gauge students’ learning on an ongoing basis.
WTL Research
Writing to Learn is grounded in decades of research that demonstrate how writing promotes connection, understanding, and critical thinking. Instead of thinking of writing’s functions as either self-expression or communicating with others, the act of writing is also valuable for us to make sense out of what we are learning because putting words on paper requires us to represent information logically and coherently for our own understanding. As Toby Fulwiler and Art Young (1982) explain in Language Connections: Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum: “In this sense language provides us with a unique way of knowing and becomes a tool for discovering, for shaping meaning, and for reaching understanding” (p. x).