Writing, thinking, and learning

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editorially /peaking

Writing, Thinking, and Learning Society needs bright people who can think critically about difficult problems, who recognize questions that need answering, and who know how to formulate questions that can be answered. The ultimate goal of education is to provide an environment in which young people can develop such skills. From a student's nersnective. the studv of technical subiects like chemistry is a11 too ofted viewed as simply the acc;mulation of new ideas, techniques, perspectives, language, and relationships. Many students can acquire a fine set of useful tools, but they often complete their formal education without having had experience in using them, and they do not have the slightest idea of how to go about gaining that experience. Help in this regard comes from those who take a broader A number of leamine.. soecialists view of the learning.. mocess. . . believe that writing is intimately connected to thinking, and that real learning-the kind that endures, the kind that involves the educational psychologists' "deep processing"requires thinking. In their view, the ability to write well reflects a capacity to think clearly. I t follows that if we stress processes to improve students' writing, we are in effect improving their ability to. think. Most would agree that real learning and understanding are evident when students can explain, and defen-d their own view of the material in queetion in contrast to repeating back the teacher's or the book's view. Real learnine involves acauirine information. pulling it apart, seeking t f e underlying &&re andlor the relationships between the parts, and finally constructing a personal view of the subject. Such a personal view does not, of course, come from taking the teacher's view down as lecture notes, or reading someone else's view in a textbook and underlinine the main noints. writing is one way t o give students a basis for really understanding a subject. Writing about a subject requires thinking about it, unless one is just copying another's words.

The very act of writing forces a student to proceas information, which in itself is a fundamental act of learning. Students who write their version of anything-a lecture, an examination question, or a section in a textbook-have to pick out the main points, f i d the appropriate evidence for the right argument, and eneaee in some editine. Each of these actions renresents some aspect of informatiol~processing.There is evidence that ifstudents think thev will have to write about a subiect thev will go about learninithe material differently than if they on$ have to recoenize it. Thus. reauirine students to write about the content i f a course is a k a i o f geiting them to think about the subiect in a manner different from that involved in the more passive learning modes of note-taking and textbook underlining. The active thinkine involved in the orocess of writing requires understandingconcepts, analysis of information, evaluation of evidence, and the construction and teating of hypotheses, all of which are higher-level intellectual skills needed to think critically about difficult problems and t o formulate questions that need to be answered. Not only does writing reflect clear thinking, but it is obviously a major means of communication. Real understanding of a subject also produces an ability to communicate about it clearly and logically in a variety of ways across a spectrum of circumstances. The most brilliant thinking in the world won't do us much good until the thinker can communicate those thoughts to the rest of us. If one of our goals-indeed perhaps the gd-as teachers is to produce chemists who will be on the leading edge of the subject in the future, we would be wise to eive them the commu~cationskills which will allow them to iffect others. Writine. thinkine. and leamine are inexorablv bound together. WL should &courage the ievelopment ofmeaningful ways to incorporate writing in chemistry courses a t all levels. Not to do so would be uncaring. JJL

Volume 61 Number 10 October 1964

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