Although we ourselves have enthusiastically advocated writing across the curriculum and related reforms, we have found no convincing research base for these programs.

The above comment, made by Langer and Applebee in the Department of Education-sponsored report How Writing Shapes Thinking, reflects the current status of a nation-wide educational program known as Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC).

WAC refers to focusing on writing in courses besides English composition such as biology, history, literature, mathematics, and chemistry. WAC has several strong features, but in some ways it has been oversold. Also, it tends to shift the responsibility and accountability for teaching writing away from where they belong, the English class.

WAC -- which has the goals of improving writing ability, reasoning skill, and course mastery in academic subjects -- emerged from the same tradition and teachers that produced the process approach described in Chapter 4, partly to rectify the disappointing performance of the process approach in English classes.

As explained in Chapter 4, English teachers find the question "What should I write about?" a perennial problem with the process approach. So process theorists suggest that students use the approach for writing about the subject matter of other courses. Writing about the material in a history or chemistry class solves the problem of what to write about.

WAC LOST

A primary rationale for WAC is the claim that writing is a way of discovering new knowledge, ideas, and insights. The major evidence for the claim comes from reports by some professional writers that they are often surprised by what they write, that characters in their novels or plays develop independent personalities and control what the typewriter prints. Thurber paints such a picture in contrasting his work habits with those of a collaborator:

Elliot Nugent . . . is a careful constructor. When we were working on The Male Animal together he was constantly concerned with plotting the play. He could plot the thing from back to front -- what was going to happen here, what sort of situation would end the first-act curtain and so forth. I can't work that way. Nugent would say, "Well, Thurber, we've got our problem, we got all these people in the living room. Now what are we going to do with them?" I'd say that I didn't know and couldn't tell him until I sat down at my typewriter and found out. I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going.

WAC proponents also cite the sayings of two Soviet psychologists, Vygotsky and Luria, to support their suppositions. Soviet psychology since Pavlov has been devoutly behavioristic -- in accord with materialistic Communist philosophy -- and interprets mental experiences as epiphenomena of physiological reactions and physical acts. Luria, for example, writes: "It is not understanding that generates the act (of writing), but far more the act that gives birth to understanding -indeed the act often far precedes understanding.".

Based on such comments, advocates of WAC believethat having students write about the subject matter of a course is the best way of helping them create meaning, adding to their depth of understanding while also improving analytical thinking ability. In "Definition of Writing to Learn" Toth elaborates:

Writing becomes a basic extension of the thinking process: discovering, imagining, evaluating, classifying, recalling, questioning, remembering, deciding, connecting, and hypothesizing.

As students learn how to use writing to learn, they discover that writing can work for them personally. Writing as thinking can serve them as a learning tool. The student's personal interactions with the reading content awakens memory, bonds a connection with prior knowledge, stimulates an awareness of what is known, and suggests what one may want to know about a subject.

WAC program director Soven confirms, "For more than ten years now we have urged our colleagues to view writing as both a thinking process and a powerful tool for stimulating creative thought." Such urgings caught the attention of educators in various academic disciplines seeking ways to improve students' content mastery as well reasoning and writing skills. WAC advocates wrote numerous articles and books and also conducted workshops suggesting ways for teachers to incorporate additional writing into their classes. Here are the most common suggestions:

How do students react to WAC? Couch shares a precaution with teachers to insure they have students to answer this question:

A . . . concern is that if students are asked to write in courses they already consider difficult, they will be overwhelmed and may even drop the courses. There is some basis for this fear, but it need not be a major deterrent. Most instructors would agree that to impose heavy writing assignments on students already challenged by terminology and concepts would be unwise.

Once students have been gingerly introduced to WAC, should teachers collect, correct, and grade their letters, logs, and papers? "Evaluating papers, like writing them, can be extremely time-consuming and wearing on one's nerves and spirit," intimates Improving Student Writing: A Guidebook for Faculty in All Disciplines. To reduce wear and tear on a teacher's nerves and time, Tschudi distinguishes between personalized notes" and "journals."

I teach my students what I call "personalized notetaking." Instead o copying down facts from texts or lectures, students should interact constantly with their material -- critically, analytically, aesthetically, personally. Their notes should reflect their point of view as well as the content of a course. . . .

A journal is more formal than a set of notes; it focuses on students' reactions to readings or lectures or discussion rather than emphasizing content.

Although the distinction between notes and journals may not be totally clear from these definitions, a teacher ought not be too rigid about this because, according to Tschudi, the former consumes less of his or her time:

Personalized notes need not be read or evaluated by the instructor, although I usually collect the notebooks from time to time to see if students have the basic ideas. Personalized notes are generally a private piece of writer-based prose, however -- an aid to the student in mastering the field (but providing a fringe benefit to everyone by increasing the amount of learn-by-doing writing being produced). . . .

Although essentially writer-based, journals should also communicate with the instructor, who collects them from time to time for reading and response. I tell my students that I will not respond to every item in their journals (a task that would obviously be impossible with classes of any but seminar size). Rather, I scan the journals for highlights and to get a sense of the interaction with the course material that is taking place. I also invite students to star or asterisk items to which they particularly want a response from me.

In WAC students are told they should write without expecting class credit or teacher comments but solely for their improved understanding and course mastery; however, teachers find them generally unconvinced. Most students take an assignment seriously only if it is to be handed in and contributes in some way to their grade, claiming all courses place heavy demands on their time. Perhaps if WAC activities showed more dramatic benefits, students would find them more intrinsically motivating. As it stands, if teachers don't bother periodically collecting, evaluating, and crediting WAC assignments, students don't bother doing them. Describing one teacher's experience, Langer and Applebee say:

At the beginning of the project, he tried to divorce the learning logs from the point system, emphasizing the value of the logs for their own sake. While fine in theory, in practice this approach made both teacher and students uncomfortable. The learning logs were not fully institutionalized until the following year, when they gained their own point value.

Another teacher graded all the writing he requested of students because "When you say it's a checkoff assignment, the kids say, 'Oh, okay,' and you get a laid-back attitude and you have to guard against that sort of thing."

The time and complexities involved in responding to students' papers is reflected by this discussion from the section "Strategies for Helping Students Write for Content Courses" in the text Integrated Skills Reinforcement.

About errors, however, you have to be really careful, because pointing them out at very early draft stages is a mistake. When writers are still developing their ideas, they need to focus on logic and clarity of expression and not on spelling or on errors with subjects and verbs. Comments on first drafts generally should avoid discussion of language errors altogether. However, when students submit a draft beyond the first -and certainly when they submit their final manuscripts -- you do need to call attention to mistakes.

But you do not want to correct those mistakes. What is wrong with an instructor's correcting a student's error or with making other kinds of editorial changes on students' papers? In the first place, the students themselves should be the only ones to alter, finally, the language they have produced. . . .

Thus the recommendation here is for you to call attention to problems and errors but not to make changes. Instead, identify problems in the margin next to the lines in which they appear, or raise questions about choices made by students in regard to language or syntax. For example:

You made two subject-verb agreement errors on this page.

Why did you use this word?

Why did you use a period here instead of a comma?

Some instructors circle or underline errors on the line so that students know which words need correction. To point out mistakes, others use conventional marking symbols with which students usually have had some experience in past English courses. (If you do use marking symbols, be sure to provide in your statement of your general writing requirements -- see Strategy 15 -- a list of those symbols along with explanations of their meaning. . . .

In addition, the text suggests teachers write comments at the end of "early and intermediate drafts and on final manuscripts" explaining strengths and then weaknesses.

Integrated Skills Reinforcement was written by five teachers at LaGuardia Community College and presents the best available solutions to problems faced in implementing WAC. The critical comments in this chapter are directed at WAC, not at the work of sincere educators who have labored hard trying WAC as a last resort because better methods for teaching writing skills in English classes have not been available until recently.

Another view of the class time and student work involved in trying to seriously implement WAC is shown by this advice in Integrated Skills Reinforcement on how teachers can save their own time by having students provide feedback on writing.

Step 10: Develop a collaborative situation in which students offer comments on each other's drafts. A useful strategy is to arrange for peer feedback. Put students into groups: review the terms of the assignment; then ask each writer to read his or her draft aloud while the rest of the group takes notes on strengths and weaknesses in the expression of ideas. To guide constructive collaboration, you will find it helpful to prepare with the class a checklist of pointers to consider in reacting to drafts each time around. . . .

After each reader is finished, group members may discuss the draft with the author. Or you can arrange for groups of three to read papers and then to write commentary for their colleagues. With this plan each student takes home two critiques to guide revisions.

This description shows the time but not the problems involved in using students to provide feedback on papers. The problems encountered are so common and troublesome that Spear has written an entire book to deal with them entitled Sharing Writing: Peer Response Groupsin English Classes in English Classes. She divides problems with peer groups into five types: confusion over the purpose of the groups and the students' roles in them, inability to read group members' tests analytically, misperceptions about revision, inability to work collaboratively with groups, and failure to monitor and maintain group activity. Preparing students to reduce these problems takes time away from other class activities, which is a general objection that many teachers have to WAC. Glassman, summarizing an attempt to introduce WAC at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, reports, "In order to instill a writing-asprocess attitude, the writing faculty member urged his partner to use collaborative techniques after the initial critiques came in. The management faculty member freely admitted her first attempt at inducing collaboration with her students was a flop. (She called it a'bad experience.') But she saw the usefulness of the collaborative techniques and gamely vowed to try them in other semesters." If a management professor had trouble managing collaboration, one can understand difficulties encountered by other teachers.

Whimbey tried having students write in journals for 10 minutes at the end of each lecture in a psychology class in 1971 at Hayward State University. He had learned of the idea in a workshop at neighboring University of California, Berkeley.

Whimbey felt that the top 40% of his students generally learned class material adequately with the standard lecture-textbook format, but he was looking for a technique to improve the learning of weaker students. He collected and read sample journal entries but did not make comments because this would have taken time from other work and he understood it to be unnecessary, having read assurances like this from Fulwiler:

A common objection . . . raised by classroom teachers is the amount of time it takes to assign and evaluate student writing, especially in large classes. However, recent composition theory supports, more strongly than ever, the importance of the writing students do strictly for themselves, writing the teacher need never see nor formally evaluate. I'm speaking, of course, about student journals, a time-honored form of writing which, when well used, is capable of revolutionizing classroom learning. . . . Assigning journals increases writing fluency, facilitates learning, and promotes cognitive growth, regardless of class size or disciplinary specialization.

In reading the journals, Whimbey found that the better students were generally able to write with understanding about basic concepts, whereas the poorer students had both weaker writing skills and less grasp of the material. However, the journals did not seem to appreciably improve skills or understanding over the course of the semester, so journal writing was not continued in future classes. Class time seemed better spent presenting concrete examples to illustrate difficult concepts or letting students work together solving problems based on taught principles. Although other teachers had similar experiences in the 1970s, WAC proponents have continued to publicize WAC -- with creative abandon concerning lack of solid evidence -- as the best thing since sliced bread, fooling one teacher or school after another into trying it. A typical example is a chemistry teacher who Langer and Applebee report in 1987 learned of WAC through the Bay Area Writing Project, whereupon she "tried using learning journals and had found them unsuccessful because the students did not focus on the critical issues, nor did they give her feedback to help her make constructive change in the curriculum." In addition to journals and papers, WAC has another suggestion for math classes, explained by Couch: "Classes in mathematics frequently have few writing assignments. And yet at times students can be helped by writing out, step by step, the procedure they are following to solve a problem." Couch quotes Myers that "Gaps in learning can be spotted easily if students are asked to exchange papers and check each other's paper for accuracy." To get a picture of the step-by-step procedure used in working a problem, an analytical student was asked to "think aloud" and explain his steps as he solved this one: Fred is renovating a haunted house he bought. The kitchen is 20 feet long. For 14 of these 20 feet it is 9 feet wide, but because of the hidden passageway, it is only 7 feet wide for the remainder. How many square feet of Italian marble will Fred need to cover the floor? Student Response

"I'm going to make a diagram of the room so I can see it. The problem says the room is 20 feet long, so I'll draw a room and write 20 along one wall."

"Next it says for 14 feet of the 20, the room is 9 feet wide. So I'll write 9 at this end."

"And I'll come down 14 feet along this side -- let's see. The whole length is 20. Half of 20 is 10. So 10 would be half the way down. Fourteen would be a little more than half. About three."

"It says the room is only 7 feet wide for the remainder, so I'll . . . 7 from 9 is 2 . . . so I'll go in 2 feet and then down to the end."

"The distance remaining to the end is 6 feet so I'll write that in."

The problem solver continued to explain his steps in this way. Students find that thinking aloud is initially a bit cumbersome, but they adjust to it quickly. However, they complain that writing all their observations, mental operations, and decisions is time consuming and tedious. They say it is "like writing a letter instead of marking a call. Calling is easier. You can work for half an hour writing a letter -- or just make a relaxed ten-minute call." Furthermore, studies indicate that having students think aloud while solving problems can improve analytical ability and course mastery. Bloom and Broder reported an experiment in which analytically weak students worked in pairs and took turns solving problems while thinking aloud. They were shown examples of how good reasoners work in small, careful steps to interpret material and answer questions, and they were told to work the same way. Thinking aloud reduced their tendency to skim material superficially and jump to conclusions. Instead they focused more on interpreting information carefully, synthesizing it to form an accurate overall picture, and reasoning in precise steps to reach a correct answer. Follow-up data showed that their new cognitive style resulted in improved grades on classroom tests. This procedure, called thinking aloud pair problem solving, has been incorporated into the SOAR Project (described in Chapter 3) -the country's most successful program for helping minority students enter medical professions. In addition, thinking aloud problem solving has been found useful in improving reading comprehension by Brown, mathematical ability by Lochhead, medical reasoning by Blanc, and problem-solving skills in chemical engineering by Woods. Thinkitig aloud pair problem solving is just one form of a pedagogy called collaborative learning in which students work together to comprehend and apply academic material. In some classes, students work in groups of three (with a strong, average, and weak student in each group) as they master content and use it to answer questions. Numerous reports can be found in the professional literature on applications of collaborative learning in different schools. Collaborative learning can be more effective than peer-response writing groups because its learning tasks can be better defined, and the skills required can be taught immediately before students attempt to apply them. With properly structured collaborative learning, students are only expected to help each other advance a small step beyond their current skills. In math, for instance, the teacher may spend 15 minutes introducing a topic and solving two sample problems. Then students can work increasingly more complex problems in a thinking aloud pair problem solving format, while the teacher circulates among them checking progress. This is more feasible for students than having them read each other's multiple-page papers and comment on everything from grammar and sentence structure to content and organization, requiring a large untaught knowledge base. Also, in collaborative learning students do not feel they are criticizing each other as harshly as they do in making paper-revision suggestions with WAG. Aside from the practical problems of WAC, its real unraveling is a fatal flaw of fiction for fact in its underlying theory. WAC is an educational edifice whose engineers claim it can support all academic disciplines, built on a cotton candy foundation. WAC proponents profess the doctrine that people learn as they write -- ideas are born as pens mate with pages. Writing is revered as a major route for discovering meaning, a way of knowing, a fountain of logic and inspiration. Invariably testimonials such as that by Thurber cited earlier are offered for support. Thurber is the creator of Walter Mitty, a gentle little man who daydreamed fantastic, exciting worlds in which he was a stunning hero and systems like WAC could work. The point is that the testimonials presented as factual evidence are invariably fiction writers' reports. Writing as described by Thurber is not a way of creating knowledge but fiction; it is not learning but fantasizing. Scientists seldom describe themselves sitting down at the word processor devoid of ideas and then watching a research report come out at their fingertips. In The Double Helix, Watson describes the activities that led to his discovery of the structure of DNA -- observing, model-building, discussing, calculating, and drawing: Three days later the phosphorous atoms were ready, and I quickly strung together several short sections of the sugar-phosphate backbone. Then for a day and a half I tried to find a suitable two-chain model with the backbone in the center. All the possible models compatible with the B-form X-ray data, however, looked stereochemically even more unsatisfactory than our three-chained models of fifteen months before. . . . There was no difficulty in twisting an externally situated backbone into a shape compatible with the X-ray evidence. In fact, both Francis and I had the impression that the most satisfactory angle of rotation between two adjacent bases was between 30 and 40 degrees. . . . Francis' interest began to perk up, and at increasing frequencies he would look up from his calculations to glance at the model. . . . My doodling of the bases on paper at first got nowhere . . . Not until the middle of the next week, however, did a nontrivial idea emerge. It came while I was drawing the fused rings of adenine on paper. Suddenly I realized the potentially profound implications of a DNA structure in which the adenine residue formed hydrogen bonds similar to those found in crystals of pure adenine. If DNA was like this, each adenine residue would form two hydrogen bonds to an adenine residue related to it by a 180-degree rotation. Most important, two symmetrical hydrogen bonds could also hold together pairs of guanine, cytosine, or thymine. I thus started wondering whether each DNA molecule consisted of two chains with identical base sequences held together by hydrogen bonds between pairs of identical bases. When a scientist writes up his findings, he continues to think and sometimes has new insights. But such insights-while-writing are just one source of a nonfiction writer's ideas. Archimedes was not sitting at his desk writing but up to his waist in tub water when he formulated the principle of liquid displacement and went running through the streets of Syracuse clothed only in a bath towel yelling "Heureka! Heureka!" Surrounded by water, he discovered something about water. Similarly Edison, surrounded by electricity, made discoveries about electricity. So writers writing, surrounding themselves with forms of expressing ideas, may discover a new way to express some idea -- a way that makes an argument more convincing or an explanation more understandable. They discover something about writing, not about the physics of fluids or electricity. The greatest proportion of learning-while-writing concerns forms of expression and fictional plots, not the topics to which WAC generally addresses itself such as principles of chemistry. Langer and Applebee in How Writing Shapes Thinking note that, if the assumptions of WAC are correct, "if writing is so closely related to thinking, we might expect to be able to cite a variety of studies that support the contribution of writing to learning and instruction. Yet recent reviews of the relevant literature . . . make it obvious that there has been little research on this issue". WAC is based on the assumption "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". Langer and Applebee conclude that more "research is essential before we can knowledgeably suggest that asking students to write is an important part of the teaching of subject-area content, not just a favor to the English department". The strong emphasis on writing about reactions and feelings to create personal meaning -- the legacy of focusing on fiction for facts about writing -- has led WAC to overlook or slight one of the most effective forms of writing to improve learning.

WAC REGAINED

 Taking notes while reading textbooks is among the oldest yet best ways of using writing to improve learning. It is also, ironically, the one writing activity WAC has neglected to encourage because of its stress on having students write freely, express impressions, and use the process approach to create their own meaning. In a major review of the research literature, Stotsky found that "A number of studies, old and new, suggest the usefulness of . . . [taking notes, outlining, and summarizing] for improving comprehension or retention of information in reading material." She adds "those who seek to improve reading through writing activities or writing instruction may be most successful with writing exercises that entail the reading of instructional texts. Writing instruction and writing activities designed primarily to improve free writing may have some effect on reading comprehension but, apparently, not a great one . . ." In other words, research indicates that simply taking notes on a text -- writing key terms and paraphrasing main ideas while reading -seems to be at least as effective for improving comprehension and recall as the activities recommended by WAC. These are exemplified by Sears' suggestion that students free-write after reading assignments, focusing on these points: What questions came to mind as you read? What memories or associations occurred? What seems most or least important and why? How did you respond to difficult passages? Since notetaking on textbooks improves content mastery, teachers might make this a required part of courses -- particularly social studies and literature courses which, in contrast to math and science courses, involve extensive reading without opportunities for application in problem solving. The question is, how can students be encouraged to take notes on textbooks regularly? The answer, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, is the most valuable insight to emerge from WAC. Students neglect it unless teachers collect it -- this is the lesson learned from WAC with a direct application to notetaking. Students tend to neglect writing assignments unless teachers collect, evaluate, and credit them toward course grades. Most students do not make the effort to write just for its own benefits, even when the benefits are as evident as from taking textbook notes. Students need a little extra prodding, an immediate, concrete reward. Based on what Langer and Applebee report that WAC teachers found they need to do to elicit writing, a teacher could collect the notes (the more frequently the better, preferably every class), write comments about anything missing, misunderstood, or well expressed, and enter credit in the grade book -- either just a check or a 1-2-3 rating. The accumulated credits might raise a student's grade as much as one letter grade. Students need not be taught any formal notetaking system with capital and small letters, arabic and Roman numerals, or other labels for headings. However, it might be helpful for the teacher to display a set of good notes from a student text assignment on an overhead projector and read through them, so students have an understanding and model of notetaking. This can be done early in the course and, if needed, again as part of preparing for tests, because it reviews course content. While paraphrasing the text is generally preferable, when a student is not able to paraphrase because of comprehension or language difficulties, copying a sentence or two verbatim might be the most beneficial alternative. To give students additional help, Heiman and Slomianko have developed a program that teaches them how to take notes which focus on the integrated meaning of lectures and textbooks by asking crucial questions of the material. At the elementary school level, a form of WAC that is proving useful is to have youngsters copy material in various content areas -have them copy math word problems, textbook summaries, homework assignments, and even questions on tests. This is supported by the research reviewed in Chapter 5 on the benefits of copying for writing skills. According to Jordan and Moorhead, a survey of non-English faculty at Eastfield College in Dallas revealed that "50+ percent were interested in having students write in their classes, that 74 percent agreed with the philosophy of WAC, but that only 5 percent would assign more writing if they were provided some assistance by the English faculty." While non-English faculty do not want to assign more writing, they are generally quite receptive to any help English teachers can offer with the writing that is already a part of their courses. WAC is now taking on a broader, less prescriptive role. Teachers from English departments help in various ways to communicate the importance of strong writing skills to students and faculty in all areas, and a number of new activities are being subsumed under the WAC umbrella. Jordon and Moorhead report, for example, that an English professor paired through a WAC program with an economics professor helped develop "a seminar presentation for economics students (and others) on summary and letter writing" and "a grading grid for drafts of papers and letters and for final products to ease grading chores." Another English teacher, paired with a child development instructor/program coordinator "worked with her as she rewrote course competency expectations for the two dozen courses offered in the child development program. In addition, he assisted her in the formulation of research topics, in their wording, and in the analysis/evaluation of the finished products." Glassman of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University reflects: For a variety of reasons, we found while implementing a partner approach to writing across curriculum that, as in nouveau cuisine and waistlines, less is more. An intense application of WAC sometimes had the adverse effect of developing student antipathy, overburdening both partners and, to a noticeable extent, creating disharmony among a curriculum partner's department mates. Glassman entitled his paper "The Light Touch: Minimal Applications of the Partner Approach to Writing Across the Curriculum", and recommended that WAC instructors help other teachers develop better methods for making and evaluating writing assignments. This may include helping them formulate and clarify assignments, providing handouts on the format of required papers and other writing topics, speaking to students about writing topics (especially the importance of revision), and imparting a better understanding of grading papers. He concludes: The results of our experience indicate that anyone interested in putting a partner-oriented WAC program in place would probably be best served by leaving the heavy-duty writing instruction in the English classroom and concentrating on minimal contact and assignments with across-curriculum partners. Looking at this another way, two methods for improving writing, WAC and sentence combining, have now accumulated two decades of research suggesting that increasing the use of SC in English classes is a more effective way to improve students' writing skills than wasting the time of English teachers on large-scale WAC projects.