How Explicit Writing Instruction Can Compensate for Gaps in Background Knowledge

Writing is potentially the most powerful lever we have for building knowledge and improving reading comprehension. It can uncover gaps in background knowledge that prevent students from accessing grade-level material. And, because writing helps new information stick, it can also boost students’ academic performance.

But writing is the most difficult thing we ask students to do. If inexperienced writers are asked to write at length, they can easily become overwhelmed as they juggle everything from spelling to word choice to organizing their thoughts. And if students are asked to write only about personal experience or topics in a separate writing curriculum, writing won’t help them acquire the knowledge they need to succeed in school.

Join this informative podcast as we talk with esteemed researcher and author Natalie Wexler. She will share ways to make writing less overwhelming by starting at the sentence level and how to include writing activities in the content of the core curriculum. This is an approach that shouldn’t be limited to English classes. It can have powerful effects in any subject—and at any grade level.

Guest Presenter

Natalie Wexler

Natalie Wexler is an education writer and the author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How to Fix It (Avery 2019). She is also the co-author, with Judith C. Hochman, of The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades (Jossey-Bass, 2017), and a senior contributor to the education channel on Forbes.com. Her newsletter, Minding the Gap, on Substack, is available for free. Click here to view past posts and subscribe.

Her articles and essays about education and other topics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the MIT Technology Review, The American Scholar, and other publications. She has spoken about education before a variety of groups and appeared on a number of TV and radio shows, including Morning Joe and NPR’s On Point and 1A.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University, a Master of Arts degree in history from the University of Sussex (UK), and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked as a reporter, a Supreme Court law clerk, a lawyer, and a legal historian. The author of three novels, she lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and has two adult children.

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Natalie Wexler:

It's not that kids don't want to write. It's that they haven't been explicitly taught how to do it. And once you show them how to construct a sentence and how to put a paragraph together, what I've heard is that reluctant writers often become eager writers.

Narrator:

You just heard from Dr. Natalie Wexler, international literacy expert and author of The Knowledge Gap. Dr. Wexler is our guest today on EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:

This is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We're so excited to have our listeners back with us today. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, where it is extremely hot. Today, we are excited to welcome Natalie Wexler, Washington, D.C.-based education journalist focused on literacy, the importance of writing skills, and the achievement gap noted by ongoing NAEP scores and input from college professors regarding the quality of writing of incoming students. She is the co-author of The Writing Revolution, Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades, and the author of The Knowledge Gap, the Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System and How to Fix It. She is also a contributor on education to forbes.com and the author of three novels. Welcome, Natalie.

NW:

Thanks Pam. I'm delighted to be here.

PA:

Tell us a bit more about your background and what drew you to literacy teaching and learning before you became an author and education journalist.

NW:

Well, I've never been a teacher. My mother was a teacher. That is, I've never been a teacher at the K–12 level. I have taught writing and English as a second language to highly motivated adults, but I know that’s a whole different ballgame. But about oh, 12 years ago now, I got very interested in the education reform efforts that were going on in Washington, D.C., where I live, and I started just looking into it and it seemed incredibly important. I was specifically focused on what is sometimes called the achievement gap, this gap in test scores and other education outcomes between students at the upper and lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. And it just seemed to me incredibly important to figure out how to narrow that gap. And it looked like we weren't making as much progress as we should be. So, I drew on my background as a journalist and I started writing about it for a local news website, but I just stumbled upon some issues that were clearly bigger than Washington, D.C. And that led me to dig even further.

PA:

All right. Wow. What a journey. I think we all have our journey to teaching and learning in so many different ways and how we all can collaborate and provide that input. We've heard you say that writing is potentially the most powerful lever we have for building knowledge and improving reading comprehension. Tell us more about that and how writing can uncover and support those gaps in background knowledge and application of strategies preventing students from accessing grade-level materials.

NW:

Yeah, I mean, I think writing has a huge potential and it really hasn't been unlocked. But the potential has to do with the way our minds take in new information. It has to do specifically with working memory, which is that aspect of our consciousness where we're taking in and trying to make sense of new information. And the important thing about working memory is that it can easily get overwhelmed. It can only handle about four or five new items maybe for about 20 seconds before you start forgetting stuff. And you don't have the cognitive capacity to really think about what you're trying to take in. And what writing can do is get around that limitation on working memory in a really effective way. So, the way around those constraints of working memory is to have more relevant information stored in long-term memory. So, that means you have to, first of all, transfer information, new information from working memory to long-term memory and a great way to do that is to attach meaning to it, maybe by explaining it to someone else.

And then you also have to be able to retrieve that information when you need it, because if you can just withdraw information from long-term memory, it doesn’t take up that space in working memory. And it turns out that a very effective way to practice retrieving an item is again, to attach meaning to it by explaining it to someone else in your own words. And the more you do that, the more likely it is you’re going to be able to retrieve the information when you need it. So, writing is a powerful way of both transferring information to long-term memory in the first place, and also practicing that retrieval of it. Because when we're writing, that is what we're doing. We're retrieving information from long-term memory that we've slightly forgotten and putting it in our own words, explaining it to the unknown reader. So, that's the potential of it.

It is also a very effective way of figuring out what kinds of gaps in background knowledge are preventing kids from accessing the grade-level work that we're asking them to do. Especially with anything really other than math, I would say you can't sort of go back and just cover everything that kids might have missed in previous years if they have these gaps in knowledge. But what writing can do is, especially if you are doing it in manageable chunks like sentences, if you give everybody in the class a sentence stem to complete about the content you're teaching, and I can go into examples of that later, but what you get back will very quickly tell you there are kids who just have misconceptions. If they need some additional information, that's going to help them access the content. So, it's a very effective way of pinpointing what is it that we need to fill in here so that kids can actually do grade-level work. So, that's really what a lot of the potential of writing is.

PA:

So, Natalie, what you're saying is writing can help transfer that information from working memory to long-term memory, which will allow students not only to retrieve, but be able to explain and writing is the tool used to make it happen and also to uncover those gaps, right? Because kids' gaps are different based on their experience, where they've come from, what they have interacted with. It's just a different experience for each child as they're going through that learning situation.

NW:

Yeah. And I think teachers, we often rely on kids to sort of raise their hands and say, "Wait a minute, I don't understand this." And often they don't do that. So, by the time we figure out that there's something they're not understanding, or there's some piece of knowledge that they're missing that's preventing them from learning what we are expecting them to learn, is sometimes too late. So, writing can be that kind of just-in-time identifier of what's needed.

PA:

Right. Great. And you're right. Students don't always raise their hands. I know that sometimes adults are reluctant to raise their hand or ask a question.

NW:

Absolutely. Yep.

PA:

What do we know from national assessments about American students' writing ability?

NW:

Well, I wish we knew more. But what we do know is that a lot of kids are not writing well. The most recent national test of students' writing ability, which was done in 2011 and it showed that only about 27 percent of eighth- and 12^th-graders were at the proficient level or above. That's on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And that's a lower proportion than is it proficient or above in reading. That's about a third of students. So, we're talking about a quarter of students being proficient in writing, which it stands to reason that there would be fewer because actually writing is harder than reading.

Now, those tests can't tell us exactly why or exactly what the problems are. And they're also over 10 years old, those results at this point. I doubt things have gotten better, but I will say that the dismaying news that I got recently is that we're not scheduled to give another one of these national writing tests until 2030, which means there'll be a 20-year gap between these assessments of kids' writing. And the NAEP tests reading every two years. And I think that's just a reflection of how we haven't really given writing the attention it deserves.

PA:

Yes, definitely. And the NAEP scores have given us an indication that we have to have some attention to writing.

NW:

Yep.

PA:

Well tell me, Natalie, how has writing been taught in the past and what's the dominant approach today?

NW:

Yeah, well, I think it's clear from those test scores that whatever we've been doing hasn't been working very well for most students. The traditional approach is thought of as teaching grammar, rules of grammar, parts of speech, maybe having kids diagram sentences. And some people feel like we need to do more of that. And in some ways we do, but studies going back maybe 100 years now have shown that for many kids, that kind of grammar instruction in the abstract doesn't carry over to their own writing. It's just, it's too abstract. And, so partly, I think in reaction to that research in the last 20 or 30 years, the dominant approach to the extent that we teach writing at all has been to not pay so much attention to rules of grammar conventions, but just to focus more on having kids express themselves, to develop their fluency, their voice, their writerly voice.

But, unfortunately, for most kids that hasn't really worked either. And one of the problems there I think is, well, one problem is that writing's really hard. So, if you ask kids to write at length, it just becomes harder. But often kids don't just pick up the conventions and grammar, the syntax of written language just on their own, just from reading. It often does need to be taught explicitly, but not in the abstract. It needs to be taught in the context of students' own writing. And so we haven't been doing enough of that. And it's hard when you ask students to write at length, to deal with grammar mistakes and things, and syntax errors in the context of students' own writing, because you may be getting page after page of error-filled prose, and that can be as a teacher, it's kind of overwhelming. Where do you begin? And for students, of course, it could be very discouraging to get a lot of red marks back on your written work. So, I think those are some of the problems that we've had.

PA:

Right. So, what's happened in the past, in a shift to what's happened in the present, would be two different approaches. But what it sounds like, Natalie, is we need to meet some kids somewhere in the middle, right? Make the abstract concrete, make it real for them as we still give that explicit, direct instruction in understanding grammar, but also practical application. Would you say that's a summation of what you've just said?

NW:

Yes. And there's one thing that I didn't mention. I think that is definitely the case. If a kid is writing a fragment of a sentence and she thinks it's a sentence, but it's missing a verb, then you don't even need to, especially if kids are young, you don't need to say, "You need to add a verb." But you can say, "Well, what are they doing? We don't know what they're doing." And that's a more functional approach. The other problem we've had with the way we've approached writing instruction though, is that we've really tried to teach it in isolation from the content of the curriculum. And so this more recent approach, which is sometimes called Writers' Workshop, where kids don't worry too much about the conventions, just write, they're often writing about their personal experience.

That's been the dominant approach until fairly recently. And more recently, there's been more emphasis on well we need to get kids to write more expository writing, more analytical writing, argumentative or persuasive writing. But often there'll be a separate writing curriculum with its own topics. And maybe just a couple of paragraphs, a few paragraphs of information about those topics. The kids may not have that much information to write about those topics in the writing curriculum, but also with both of these approaches, either writing about personal experience or opinion or writing about a separate topic in a separate writing curriculum, we're not using the power of writing to build the kind of knowledge we really want kids to acquire. So, one of the problems that we need to solve is really not that difficult. We have to ask kids to write about the content in social studies, in science, even in math, across the curriculum, because not only will that help them acquire writing skills, it's also going to help them acquire the knowledge in those subjects that we want them to acquire.

PA:

Oh, excellent. There are so many aspects of what you just said, Natalie, that are just warming my heart, writing in response to text and topics, the power and the knowledge gained through writing. Those are all things that are just making me very, very excited about what you're sharing with educators here. And when you think about the idea of those grammar concepts, taking a look at the functions of words, asking questions so they understand who or what did it, what did they do? What did they do it to? When, where, how, which one, how many, what kind? So, these are things that we want students to be able to understand when they're writing so that they can use the correct word, not necessarily labeling as a noun or a verb, but what's the function and how can it be used. I see wonderful application there. Well, Natalie, you mentioned some challenges you see with these approaches that we've just discussed. What method do you think would work better?

NW:

Well, I think one of the challenges that I didn't really go into is that writing, as I mentioned, I think is really difficult, more difficult than reading. It imposes a really heavy load on working memory. And we've been asking kids to write at length from really the get go. And if you're an inexperienced writer at any grade level, any age, it's quickly going to become overwhelming to write at length because you're juggling all sorts of things. If you're really little, you might be juggling letter formation and spelling, which of course is notoriously difficult in English, word choice, and organizing your thoughts and then the content you're writing about. And so one challenge here that needs to be addressed is how to make writing less overwhelming. Because if it's too overwhelming, kids are not going to get the knowledge-building benefits of writing. And they're also probably not going to learn to write well. And so the most effective way to modulate that cognitive load, we don't want to reduce it because you need to be expending some effort in order to be learning something. But to modulate that cognitive load, we should start writing instruction at the sentence level, if that's what kids need, no matter what grade level they're in. There are a lot of kids in high school who still have not learned to construct a good sentence, not because they can't, but because they haven't been explicitly taught how to do so. And not only is that going to impose a heavy cognitive load on them that's going to prevent them from really getting the benefits of writing. It's also going to prevent them from becoming good writers, because if you can't write a good sentence, you're unlikely to be able to produce a good paragraph or a good essay.

So, that is certainly one thing that I think any effective writing approach needs to do. It needs to start at the sentence level if that's what students need. It needs to embed writing instruction as much as possible in the content, the core content of the curriculum. And then thirdly, those grammar and conventions I was talking about, those need to be taught in the context of students' own writing. And as I mentioned, that's going to be easier if you're not asking students to write at length. So, it's going to be easier to do that if you're starting at the sentence level.

PA:

Great, Natalie. So, meeting students where they are with that explicit instruction. I heard that a number of times. We have to explicitly teach that writing. And I love your analogy of juggling. There are so many literacy skills we have to consider that students will need to juggle when writing and it is a more difficult, challenging literacy skill. I'd like to say it's the epitome of all literacy skills. Well, what's the relationship between writing and reading comprehension? Can you expound on that?

NW:

Sure. I'd say there are two connections or relationships. One is, as I mentioned, writing really helps sort of cement information in long-term memory. And it's known by cognitive psychologists the more general information you have in long-term memory, the more knowledge you've got, the better you are at understanding whatever you're trying to read. So, that's one relationship. But in addition to that, the language of written text is almost always more complex than spoken language. It's got its own vocabulary words like “despite” or “moreover,” and its own complex syntax with lots of clauses and various other things that we just don't hear much in conversation.

And if kids are going to be able to understand written text on their own, they need to become familiar with that sophisticated language and syntax of written text. One way to familiarize them with it is through reading aloud from complex texts that they may not be able to read yet themselves. But even more powerful is to teach them to use that kind of vocabulary and that kind of syntax in their own writing, teach them how to construct a sentence with a subordinating conjunction, etc. If they can do that themselves, they're going to be in a much better position to understand that kind of structure, that syntax, that vocabulary, when they encounter it in their reading.

PA:

That practice of actually creating will help them when they encounter these types of complex sentences in writing.

NW:

Yeah.

PA:

When students learn to write well, do we see improvement in other areas as well? For example, content-area classes, motivation, and speaking and listening skills. Are any of those impacted?

NW:

Absolutely. As I mentioned, when students write about the content they're learning in any subject area that enhances their learning, it boosts their learning. And there are studies that support that. So, science, math, social studies, all of that. Writing about that content is going to boost learning. And then certainly motivation. Teachers have told me, "Oh, my students just hate to write. And the teachers at my school hate to teach it." One of them said, "We'd rather jump off a building." And I think the problem there is often, it's not that kids don't want to write. It's that they haven't been explicitly taught how to do it. And once you show them how to construct a sentence and how to put a paragraph together, what I've heard is that reluctant writers often become eager writers. And that of course has also to do with the content of the curriculum.

One problem, especially at the elementary level, is there really isn't much content in the curriculum. And so kids don't have much to write about because we've been focusing more on reading comprehension skills and strategies, and the topics might change from day to day. But if you do spend at least a couple of weeks on a topic and do that in an engaging way, that often also really increases the motivation to write because kids are excited about what they're learning and they want to write about it. And then speaking and listening skills. Definitely I think there's a carryover there. It's kind of a two-way street. I think you kind of need to start with speaking and listening. So, for example, when you're introducing a new writing strategy, it's important to do that orally and collaboratively. And again, that has something to do with cognitive load.

If kids are trying to do it on their own, it could become overwhelming. And especially if they're writing, trying to write while they're experimenting with a new strategy. But listening and speaking are easier. They impose less of a cognitive load. So, that frees up more space and working memory to take in new information. And that could be content information, but it could also be a new way to put a sentence together. So, how to use an apositive, for example, which is a phrase describing a noun. We want to do that orally first. And we also want to embed that in content that students are familiar with, so that also can modulate the cognitive load.

But then in addition to that direction, going from speaking and listening to being able to do these things in writing, once kids do learn to construct complex sentences, etc., in their own writing, that often will carry over into their spoken language and their spoken language will become more sophisticated as well. This is something that teachers will say once they've tried this different kind of approach. And it also has to do with kids' self-concept and their self-confidence. When you explicitly teach a kid to express themselves coherently in writing, they feel more powerful, that they can do this. And I think it really has the power to change their concepts of who they are and what they can do and what they deserve from life.

PA:

So, beginning with the oral can help lead to building those reading skills and opportunities to express themselves.

NW:

Yeah.

PA:

So, I'd like you to provide some examples of writing activities. You have done that throughout our conversation together, but just to be a little bit more explicit about those writing activities that build writing skills and knowledge simultaneously.

NW:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of different activities and I think what people may be familiar with, if they're familiar with any kind of sentence-level activity, is what's often called sentence combining, where you give kids maybe three simple sentences and ask them to combine those into one longer sentence. And there are different ways they can do that. They could use conjunctions, they can use various techniques. And that has been researched and it's been found to be effective at helping students construct more complex sentences. But what it doesn't do is really build knowledge in a powerful way because it's giving kids all the information. If you give them three sentences, they don't need to really retrieve anything from long-term memory and put it in their own words. So, there are other kinds of sentence-level activities that haven't yet been researched the way sentence combining has been, but which I really hope there will be some research done on them because these other kinds of sentence-level activities can both teach writing skills and also build knowledge and build analytical abilities at the same time, helping kids connect bits of information.

So, for example, even something as basic as the difference between a complete sentence and a sentence fragment can be used as a way of building knowledge, as well as sentence-level skills, mechanical skills. So, what you can do rather than just providing the definition of a sentence, it's got a subject and a verb and it expresses a complete thought, which is probably going to be too abstract for a lot of students. You can give students a list of phrases, groups of words that are not punctuated and have them as a first step distinguish between the ones that are complete sentences and the ones that are fragments. And repeating that kind of activity and giving feedback, that helps kids absorb at a kind of gut level the difference. What is a complete sentence? Which is really pretty complicated. I mean, it seems basic, but there are high school students and beyond who don't really have that firmly in their heads.

And then once they've identified which are the sentences and which are the fragments, first they capitalize and punctuate the sentence, which is an important thing to know. But the knowledge building comes in when they need to turn the fragments into complete sentences. And to do that, they have to draw on knowledge they have in long-term memory. They have to retrieve that and they have to put it into their own words. So, for example, and as I mentioned, this can and should be embedded in any curriculum content. So, let’s say you’re teaching kids about maps in social studies. So, you could have a list of those groups of words. They identify the sentences. They identify which ones are the fragments, and then they have to fix the fragment. So, let’s say you have a fragment that just says, “Shows the cardinal directions.” Well, a kid would think, well, what is it that shows the cardinal directions?

Oh, a compass rose. And then they turn that into a complete sentence by writing, “A compass rose shows the cardinal directions.” And that's reinforcing that knowledge. It's also helping kids understand what distinguishes a sentence from a fragment. And just one other activity I'll mention that can be very powerful is giving kids a sentence stem in the beginning of a sentence and asking them to complete it in three different ways with three different conjunctions, “because,” “but,” and “so.” And each of those conjunctions is going to require kids to retrieve a different kind of information from long-term memory, put it in their own words. And it's also not all kids even pick up using those simple conjunctions just from their reading. And as I mentioned, this could be embedded in any content. So, let's say it's math class. Well, you could give kids a sentence stem like "Fractions are like decimals."

And then they have to complete it with these three different ways. So, they could write, "Fractions are like decimals because they are all parts of wholes.” For “but” they could write, "But they're written differently." And for “so” they could write, "Fractions are like decimals so they can be used interchangeably." And all of these activities are laying the groundwork for more complex, not only sentence-level construction, but also for length-year writing. And so for example, once kids have the conjunction “but” down, and that's going to be more difficult than “because.” It's asking for contrasting information, change of direction, then you could go on to "Although fractions are like decimals," which again is a construction that we often don't hear in conversation. So, you're introducing them to that subordinated conjunction and that language of written text.

PA:

Natalie, just listening to you share these practical examples of how to improve writing instruction has really warmed my heart. And I know I said that before, but it's warmed even more. Often as educators, we look at the end goal, right? What do we want our students to be able to do? Write a multiparagraph essay, but beginning at that sentence level, right? Starting there to build students up. Building that knowledge as you talked about, that working memory, that information that students are learning into that long-term memory, reinforcing through writing. Thank you for those practical, simple strategies that can be applied in any content area. Thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Natalie. Please tell our listeners how they can learn more about you and how they can follow you on social media.

NW:

Well, they can find me at my website, nataliewexler.com and they can contact me through the website. Also, I'm on Twitter. My handle is @NatWexler and I also have a free Substack newsletter called Minding The Gap, which they are welcome to subscribe to.

PA:

Thanks, Natalie. It's been a pleasure having you. Thank you for joining us.

NW:

Thanks very much, Pam. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Pam Austin:

This is Pam Austin bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you.

Narrator:

This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/edview360. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.