Writing Improves Reading

As I turn my attention to the Blogging initiative at SBP, I continue to keep in mind the important student performance goals that we have set during our Middle States reaccreditiation: improvement in our students' writing skills, and improvement in our students' critical reading skills.  The involvement of students in contributing to blogs is a vital component of our initiatives that will accomplish these goals.

We should already be aware that writing is an important piece of literacy.  During my reading assignment for the Critical Reading committee, I began to understand the research-based evidence that showed which reading instruction strategies are effective in improving reading skills.  In the same set of documents and books that I read, I also encountered many recommendations that writing ought to be included as one of the strategies that improves reading.

In the report published by the Alliance for Excellent Education (whose program on Higher and Urban Education actively funds research and initiatives in adolescent literacy) entitled Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing can Improve Reading, the authors describe their meta-analysis of numerous scientific studies of strategies that involve writing as a tool for improving reading.  They describe the overwhelming evidence that writing and reading are linked to improved literacy in adolescent learners.  The authors provide recommendations based on their meta-analysis and their expertise in adolescent literacy:

• Have students write about the texts they read.  Students' comprehension...is improved when they write about what they read, specifically when they (1) respond to a text in writing (writing personal reactions, analyzing and interpreting the text); (2) write summaries of a text; (3) write notes about a text; (4) answer questions about a text in writing, or create and answer written questions about a text;
• Teach students the writing skills and processes that go into creating text...reading skills and comprehension are improved...specifically when teachers (1) teach the process of writing, text structures for writing, paragraph and sentence construction skills (improves reading comprehension); (2) teach spelling and sentence construction skills (improves reading fluency); (3) teach spelling skills (improves word reading skills);
• Increase how much students write.  Students' reading comprehension is improved by having them increase how often they produce their own texts.

It is the third point that brought the SBP Planning Team to present the blogging initiative as a measurement in improving the writing skills of our students.  We believe that increased opportunities to write will improve writing skills, regardless of the (fortunate) positive effect that increased writing has on critical reading.

I suppose that this piles onto the already-burdened content-area teachers the additional task of also being writing teachers.  This is because the same study quoted above also indicates that a teacher cannot simply ask the students to write about what they have read; in order to be effective (i.e. improve students' reading skills), instruction must also be given about how to write.

The existing literature is very optimistic, however; there are numerous evidence-based strategies that exist (and that we can learn about) that explain how content-area teachers can efficiently incorporate writing instruction into their classrooms.  One only needs to browse the web for "writing in the content areas" to find multiple resources for learning about and then including these strategies into the classroom routines.  We will work to bring these resources together so that all of us can learn these strategies together.  That is the motivation behind assembling a literacy 'toolbox' that should be given to each SBP teacher who might be interested in helping to improve our students' writing and critical reading skills as we work toward our Middle States goals.  (More about that 'literacy toolbox' in my blog entry here.)

In the Blogging Committee, we will continue to promote the use of blogs in courses and classrooms while we also seek out additional 'tools' to be included in the SBP literacy toolbox.  Such tools will not only be aimed at writing, since as has been discussed, writing improves reading.  Two birds with one stone.

It will be worth the effort.