Writing as a Learning Activity: An Academic Study

Abstract

Research on writing as a learning activity has seen five major changes in recent years. In the last decade, meta-analyses have shown that writing's effects on learning are predictable and that a variety of variables mediate and modulate these effects. The second reason is that literature as a medium used to be assumed to be capable of generating thinking and education. A decade of study shows that writing to learn, according to the findings, is a self-regulated activity that depends on the writer's goals and approaches. A third movement, called Writing to Learn, emphasised the use of domain-general strategies to help students succeed in their studies (WTL). The WID movement, which emphasises the inclusion of genres that embody forms of reasoning particular to a certain subject, is reflected in a number of recent researches. To round things up, while WTL as a classroom activity was always at least somewhat social in nature, theoretical conceptions of it were largely solitary in focus. WTL has grown over the past two decades to embrace concepts and studies that involve social and psychological dynamics as well as individual distinctions. WTL research has traditionally focused on epistemic learning in schools, but it has lately widened its scope to include reflective learning in the workplace as well as other outputs and results from other domains, such as those from the workplace.