Writing to Reading: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading

Narrator: 

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Dr. Steve Graham:

Even students who find writing or reading challenging when they write about their text. Now, they may not write about it as eloquently as other kids do, but just engaging in that thinking around writing improves their comprehension.

Narrator:

You just heard from researcher, author, and writing expert Dr. Stephen Graham, Regents professor at Arizona State University. Dr. Graham is our guest today on EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:

Hello, this is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We are so excited to have you with us today. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are excited to welcome a respected researcher, professor, and science writing expert, Dr. Steve Graham, who teaches at the Mary Lou Fulton College at Arizona State University. For 45 years, he has studied how writing develops, how to teach it effectively, and how writing can be used to support reading and learning. In recent years, he has been involved in the development and testing of digital tools for supporting writing and reading through a series of grants from the Institute of Educational Sciences and the Office of Special Education Programs in the U.S. Department of Education. Fifteen years ago, Dr. Graham conducted groundbreaking research with Dr. Michael Hebert that illustrates how writing and the way it's taught improves students' reading comprehension and the strategies educators should use to ensure literacy success.

Dr. Graham is a prolific author and editor and among many books and articles he authored are three influential Carnegie Corporation reports, Writing Next, Writing to Read, and Informing Writing. Dr. Graham has served as an advisor to a variety of organizations, including UNESCO, National Institute of Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Zuckerberg Institute, National Writing Project, Institute of Educational Sciences, the College Board and the What Works Clearinghouse. He was the chair of the What Works Clearinghouse practice guides for both elementary as well as secondary writing. He has provided expert advice and information for a wide variety of magazine, newspaper, television, and radio reports, and is the recipient of so many awards and recognitions that I can't mention them all. Welcome, Dr. Graham. Let's get started. How important is writing for the 21st century? Tell us why it's such a critical skill and tell us about your research.

SG:

Well, I think, if you think about all the various purposes we use writing for it makes it clear that it's invaluable, both in the past, now, and in the future as well. So, when we think about writing, this is probably the apex of our use of writing. I mean, everywhere you look, people are writing. Now, it may not be what we think of as traditional writing, because we see people on their cell phones using speech-to-text synthesis to create texts that they share with others. We see kids constantly, and also adults, on social media or other platforms where they're sharing information and talking with their friends and gathering information.

We use writing for a lot of different important purposes: To share information, to record it, to tell stories, to explore who we are. We use it to persuade others, you know? We use it to heal ourselves, both physiologically and psychologically, and it's been shown effective to do so. Maybe just as importantly, when you teach students to write and you increase how much they write, they become better readers. And when we have students write about the text that they're reading or write about the material that they're learning in the classroom, one of the magical things that happens is they understand that information better and they retain it over a longer period of time. So, when we think about writing, it has its own purposes that we constantly are using it for, both digitally and by hand now, but also it's a powerful tool for reading and also for learning. So, I hope that answered your question that I think we'd be in a world of trouble without writing at this point.

PA:

Yeah, I would agree. The word you used that really resonated with me was invaluable, and you really affirmed a nice little phrase that I've learned a long time ago and I use it often that readers are writers and writers are readers. When you added that connection between reading and writing and the magic that happens, I love hearing that. Thank you for affirming that for me, steve. So, why do teachers of reading need to emphasize … You alluded to this that magic happens but why do they need to emphasize writing in the classroom in the earliest grades, right from the get-go?

SG:

So, when we think about young kids and we think about reading, often when we take a look in classrooms across the country today, we don't see a lot of writing, and this presents a problem. And why would I say something like that? Well, one of the things that we know is that students draw upon the same resources of knowledge and processes and skills when they read and write. Now, they use that knowledge and skills in different ways. Tim Shanahan has given us a good metaphor for this. We can think of it as a well of knowledge that students have two buckets: A writing bucket and a reading bucket, and they dip down into that knowledge. And so, one of the things that happens is that if we increase that knowledge, whether it's through reading or whether it's through writing, then good things happen for both of these skills. So, let me give a couple of concrete examples. When we teach young children to spell, there's an improvement in their phonological awareness, which is a critical skill for reading. We also find that not only does their phonological awareness improve, but their word-reading skills improve and guess what? Even better, fluency of reading improves and there's a strong effect on reading comprehension. Now, why would that be the case? What we suspect is happening here when we see these kind of results is that, as students make reading more fluent, it requires less cognitive effort and resources, more resources, and effort are freed up for reading comprehension.

I'll give one more example on this. That's a little bit higher level. If we teach students what the elements of a particular genre are as they write let's say something like persuasive writing that kids know that when we talk or write persuasively, we present a premise and we support that premise with reasons and evidence and explanations, and at some point, we're going to bring all of that back together so that we provide the strongest argument that we can. That sounds like it's just important for writing, but guess what? When we read and we read persuasive texts, knowing those particular elements that we use in our writing provides a hanger on which to hang information that makes it easier to understand persuasive texts that we're reading by others in terms of their arguments and analyzing them. So, both on kind of a foundational skill level is something like word reading and spelling, and at a higher conceptual level, like the basic building blocks or elements of persuasive writing or a particular genre writing, helps you become a better reader.

PA:

So, starting early on is very important, from foundational to higher writing. So, we shouldn't just assume that students at a certain level just know it all and understand it all?

SG:

Right, that's correct.
And I think one thing that's really important to emphasize here in the meta-analysis that we've done taking a look at writing and reading connections. One of the things that's clear, just teaching writing is not enough to make you the best reader you can be, but it's an important ingredient in terms of becoming that best reader and vice versa. So, we need to teach both and both need to start earlier so we can make those connections really solid.

PA:

So, increasing more opportunities for writing is the key. Are we talking about just incidental writing, Steve? Or, are we looking at explicit writing instruction? Does that impact the learning as well?

SG:

So, we're talking really about both here, and so one of the things that we found in a meta-analysis that we did in 2011, we took a look at what happens when you just increase the amount of writing that young students do grades one to six. Just doing that had a positive effect on reading comprehension. On norm-referenced tests, it increased. It had an effect size of 0.25, which is about a quarter of a standard deviation. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's really hard to move the needle on norm-referenced standardized tests.

So, incidentally, by increasing how much students write, we can have a positive impact on how well they read. Perhaps, more importantly, though, is that we know that when we teach spelling and we teach sentence construction skills, students' reading improves, both in terms of word reading and reading fluency. When we engage students in the writing process, we teach them about text structure, we teach them strategies for planning and revising there is a corresponding positive effect in terms of their reading comprehension. And so, each of the more important points that we think about in terms of reading writing makes a difference, and, in fact, this shouldn't be controversial, but I'm going to say something that some people in the science of reading would see as controversial. I think a mistake was made in 2000 in the NICHD report that we commonly think of as the big five in reading, now phonics, phonological awareness, vocabulary, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. It should have included a sixth component and that was writing. They didn't look at that. The evidence was there at the time.

PA:

Right, a sixth component that's so interesting to hear and there might be more. Yes, it makes sense what you're sharing right now as far as research and the data goes, where we're looking at building reading and writing simultaneously and, at the same time, we're also building confidence for students, aren't we?

SG:

That's correct.
So, one of the things that we just took a look at is what happens when you teach writing to students. Do they become more efficacious or confident as writers? And guess what? No surprise, as students become better writers, they become more confident writers. And we didn't do this work. But there's another meta-analysis that took a look at it from the point of view of teaching reading. Same kind of finding. You teach reading, students become more confident or efficacious readers. And the great thing about efficacy, if you're more efficacious, you're more likely to engage in those behaviors reading and writing and persist when things get difficult. And there's this kind of reciprocal relationship between efficacy and performance that the more efficacious you become typically, the better you become at that skill, in this case, reading and writing.

PA:

It makes perfect sense. You know you've shared a good bit of information in regards to the research that you analyze. Can you share with us, with our listeners, some of the research that you've conducted that you found that was very surprising?

SG:

Well, one of the things that we're doing now that may be a little surprising to folks is we're taking a look at Artificial Intelligence (AI), or Generative AI, and its potential use in the classroom, and we're focusing in on that. In terms of feedback given to students about their writing, we did a study with folks at the University of California, Irvine, and we found that the feedback by trained humans in terms of giving feedback people who had a lot of experience in terms of teaching writing and received some training and feedback wasn't that different from the feedback that AI gave. Now, humans on four of the five dimensions that we looked at and dimensions were things like how clear it was, how helpful it was, whether or not it was specific to the text, humans were slightly better on all of those dimensions except for one, but really the difference between the two was not very large. We're also finding that AI with training, is pretty good at scoring writing as well.
The other thing that we're looking at right now is how teachers use AI in the classroom to support their writing and how they're using AI, how students use it as a writing assistant. So, I think we're on the verge of some new directions in terms of thinking about writing in the classroom, and we see teachers already doing this to a small degree, and I suspect we're going to be seeing it more often in the future, and so that's kind of an area that I think if you'd asked me about two years ago, I wouldn't even been onboard with this, but I'm seeing possible, and I want to use the word possible here, positive benefits to the use of these tools.

PA:

And the key word here is benefits. Right? How can AI benefit? I love the idea, and I'm quite surprised too of the effect on feedback as well as analyzing students' work. I think that's wonderful if we could use it effectively that way. I would be a little leery also about that classroom use, but I'd be excited to see what's coming.

SG:

Well, let me give a slightly different example in terms of thinking about this, and let's not focus on AI, but computer-based feedback. We just finished a meta-analysis taking a look at computer-based feedback in about 40 studies and what we found was that it had a positive effect in true experiments and quasi-experiments on students' writing. What we would consider to be a small and moderate effect about 0.40. and it wasn't just a few studies that were generating those effects, but we saw that across studies and we saw it with students who were language learners in terms of thinking about, in the U.S., Emergent Bilingual students. Now, that doesn't mean that either human feedback at times or computer feedback is all that we hope it would be in a classroom.

But I will tell you this when I go out and talk with teachers in large groups or with principals, I often say, and I'm a little sheepish about saying this, I'll tell people you need to increase how much students are writing twofold. Now, if you said, where's the evidence for that? I can't really point to that evidence. But what we do see when we ask teachers about what they're doing in the classroom is we see very little writing going on. And so, immediately administrators push back and they should, and they'll say we can't do that. One is through teachers, another is through peers, another is through oneself, by teaching you how to do that. But I think increasingly we're going to see feedback also provided by digital tools and it'll get better over time.

PA:

So, variations for feedback should diminish the amount of writing we expect our students to do?

SG:

No, but right now I think it does. The fact that it's not easy to get feedback. It takes a lot of work. I think it does diminish how much writing is going on. I'm saying this kind of as an incidental thing that I consistently hear from administrators and also from teachers that this is something that's limiting how much writing is going on in schools.

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PA:

All right. With that in mind, Steve, I want to ask you this question: Thinking about writing, often teachers think about writing paragraphs or multi-paragraph essays. Is that the direction that the writing has to take? Are there other strategies that are maybe short, quick, direct that teachers can use that still give students the opportunity to write?

SG:

Yes, and so I'm really glad that you asked that question.

I think one of the things that we're hopefully going to see more of in the future and I'll use the state of Texas as an example of this now, because I think their state tests, for better or for worse, are driving this. On their state tests for reading now, students' reading comprehension is judged through writing activities, and so one of the things that I think can be very beneficial to students that doesn't require a great deal of time of planning, drafting, revising, editing is using writing as a tool for thinking about what you read and also for what you're learning in classrooms.

That can be as short as a small journal entry. You know, where you're reflecting about what you learn. It can be longer in terms of taking something that you've read and presenting a point of view, or taking information that you learned in a particular class and writing a story about it or how to apply it. So, it can range from something that's really short in duration, like answering a question about the information that you've just read or is presented in class, to something that's much more extended, like writing a story or a persuasive text or an informative text. But I think we're going to see more and more of that in classrooms, both for reading and for learning. Now, that doesn't take away the importance of learning to engage in the processes of planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing, but I think what we really want to see if writing is going to, you know, assume what I consider is a proper place in the classroom, we need to see writing in all subject areas and we need to see it used more increasingly.

PA:

And so that means it's important for students to write about the text that they're reading?

SG:

Right. We need to use it for the purposes of learning more consistently.

PA:

So, tell me this, Steve, how do we support students' ability to create their text? So, even starting at the sentence level, you were giving some examples of ways that they could respond to what they're reading. Sentences, maybe short paragraphs, before moving into those essays and reports. What are the required skills for students so that they can be successful?

SG:

Yeah, I'm going to take a slightly different approach to the question you're asking. You know, sometimes we think about writing and reducing it to individual component skills like creating words, creating sentences, and then creating longer text. I think, right from the get-go, kindergarten, even preschool, for kids, if we think about writing as more than just producing letters on a page, students can initially compose by drawing a picture. With that picture, they can have invented spellings in terms of the idea that they're thinking about and that can move to words and longer pieces of text. Now, obviously students don't start by being able to create longer pieces of text. But we want to have them think about composing more generally. At the same time, we want to make sure that they acquire, and I'm going to make this as simple as possible. I think there's three sets of skills we want to teach. 

One is we want to teach transcription skills, handwriting, spelling, and even typing by about second grade. These particular skills, if they're not mastered and become fluent and automatic, they interfere with other writing processes and we have considerable evidence to suggest that's the case. 

We also want to make sure that students can take the ideas they have, that they want to put on paper, that they're going to transcribe on paper. They can translate those into the sentences that fit their intentions, what they want to say, and that are grammatically correct and make sense. 

And finally, we want to help students learn how to plan what they're going to say and organize that information, in a sense, set goals, gather the information, and organize it and be able to revise throughout the writing process, both in planning as a draft and afterwards, to produce the best text possible.

So, all three sets of those skills can start very early. So, for example, in kindergarten, we should be teaching students handwriting skills and rudimentary spelling skills. We should be helping them craft simple sentences, you know, through things like sentence starters or sentence frames that are part of the sentence, and we help them learn how to craft the other part. And we want to encourage them to think about what they're saying up front and also thinking about how to make it better through revising right from the start. In first grade, an example of that latter part would be teaching kids how to brainstorm ideas that they're going to use in something they write, how to pick the ideas that are most salient for what their purposes are and getting them onto paper, even though their skills with transcription and translation still they're a very rudimentary level. We need all three going right at the start of kindergarten and on through the elementary grades.

PA:

All right. So, just to recap, transcribe that's writing, whether it's handwriting or typing to translate into sentence formation and then to organize, have those ideas and have revisions. And again, Steve, this can be done at a very basic level as students grow and gain confidence in those writing skills. Am I correct in saying that?

SG:

One is write. A second one is support. A third is teach. A fourth is connect, and a fifth is create. And so, what do I mean by that? In a very simple way, students need to write. That's the whole purpose of the game here. Second, we need to support students as they write, and that can include things like engaging them in pre-writing activities to gather information or think about their writing, or providing feedback as they write or after they write. We need to teach those fundamental, foundational strategic skills that I was just talking about in terms of transcription, translation, and planning and revising. We want to connect reading, writing, and learning, and something we haven't talked about is we want to create a classroom in which students can be successful and flourish as writers and readers.

PA:

Now, with everything that you've been sharing, this might seem like a silly question. I'm going to ask it because I know our listeners are going to want to know. Well, how much time should students be writing in school, because quite often we've got this time frame and various classrooms for one subject to another? How do educators find enough time? We think about writing just in that ELA block. How do we keep these opportunities for writing? How do we help that grow across all content areas?

SG:

So, I think one of the things here is it's a good idea to be upfront about what we know and what we don't know. So, in the What Works Clearinghouse Writing Guide, we made a recommendation of one hour a day at the elementary level be spent on writing. Now, if you push me and said, “Where's the evidence that one hour a day or 45 minutes a day, or an hour and 15 minutes a day, that was the right number?” We don't have that kind of evidence. This was based upon the expert opinions of those scholars who participated on that particular document. However, I think it's probably right. That would be my best guess, and one way of thinking about it is, students should be spending about 30 minutes a day writing and about 30 minutes a day learning to write.

Now, sometimes what happens is when you say that that bumps up against the reading curriculum because we don't integrate reading and writing, and so what I'll see folks do is kind of wring their hands like we don't have time to do that, and my suggestion would be if you don't do it, you're kind of hobbling students by not providing them the instruction that they need both for being a good writer, but also for being a better reader and a better learner. Now, that still doesn't answer the question: “How do you make this happen?” And I think one of the ways of doing that is making sure that writing occurs across the subject areas. We use it in the language arts. We use it in science, social studies, et cetera, and as students move past the elementary grades, we want teachers in every content area to use writing as a learning tool, and that means doing some teaching as well. But I think probably at the elementary grade we're going to see most of the teaching and writing happening within the language arts blocks, but we should be seeing writing occurring across the school day.

PA:

So, integration is the key. Writing as a tool across all content areas is what we're looking at?

SG:

Yes, I think that's a really good summary. Integration of reading and writing and integration of writing within not just language arts or reading, but across social studies, science, and even in areas like math.

PA:

Now, we've talked about comprehension being improved. Are there any specific reading skills that we can attribute to this integration that we've been discussing, Steve?

SG:

So you know, if you think of the big five, the evidence that we have and this cuts both ways, from reading to writing and writing to reading, what we would expect to be improved by good writing instruction and more writing in general is we'd expect reading comprehension to improve, we'd expect word reading to improve, we'd expect reading fluency to improve, and we'd expect phonological awareness to improve. The area that we really don't have much information on is vocabulary. We've only located three studies where the primary emphasis was on teaching vocabulary for writing, and while there was a relatively large effect on writing skills, we don't know what the effects would be on reading. And so, that's the one area that we don't really have a good sense of. In the other direction, those skills in writing that we've talked about, spelling can improve, sense construction improves, and writing quality improves.

PA:

Thank you so much for sharing that. But what about our struggling readers, those struggling readers and writers? We know that writing tends to be that last skill that's developed. How do we help to support them? What recommendations do you have for those students?

SG:

Well, one of the things I think is really important is let's just pick one thing to start with, but let's concentrate on writing about something that you've read. So, the way that you might think about this is, for kids who are struggling readers or for kids who find writing challenging, it may not have much of an effect in terms of improving their understanding of text. That's not what we find. What we find is that even students who find writing or reading challenging when they write about their text, now, they may not write about it as eloquently as other kids do, but just engaging in that thinking around writing improves their comprehension.

Now, with that said, if we want to help them become better at that, then what we can do is let's say we're going to ask them to write a summary of text. Summaries are not that easy to do. I mean, you and I know how to write a summary pretty well, but when you start thinking about how you teach summary writing or how you created that summary, it's a bit of a challenge. But if we teach kids, and particularly kids who find writing challenging or reading challenging, how to write a good summary, that has an even stronger effect in terms of that transfer from writing to reading or reading to writing. 

PA:

And this is where that explicit instruction comes in right.

SG:

Yeah, so I think the key here is that you engage students in these processes. It seems to help no matter what, but if you want to maximize it, you teach.

PA:

Engage and maximize. Oh, very good descriptors here. Do you have any other suggestions to share with our audience? What should they be reading or following to stay on top of the latest findings?

SG:

One of the things that I would suggest in terms of helping teachers stay on top of what's going on in writing is I think one of the easiest ways to do this is to look for current books published by editors that take the work of people doing research in this area that is teacher-friendly, you know, books written specifically for teachers by researchers and scholars in this area that look to translate and make concrete research for teachers. I think that's one of the best sources. A second is there's an amazing number of podcasts and YouTube videos that are now available for online use. I think another thing that's particularly important is to push your administrators to have more time for in-service around writing by bringing in people, particularly at the school level, who will engage in a conversation with teachers about what they do and things that might prove to be useful for them in their classrooms. And I say this last part, and it's always a good thing for me to do, is that I think the way of thinking about research or research findings is that they often indicate things that are effective in multiple classrooms.

That's what meta-analyses do. They bring together findings from multiple studies done in multiple classrooms and they say: “Well, this worked in these studies, which means that we have some evidence that this can be a useful and powerful tool in multiple classrooms.” It doesn't mean that it's going to work exactly in your classroom. If you're using something, you want to monitor its use and modify it if it's not working as expected. You know, it's kind of like when you go to the doctor. They give you a medication. It's up to you to monitor whether it works and let the doctor know that it doesn't, so to speak.

PA:

Great advice. I love the analogy there. Wow, this has been such an enlightening conversation. Dr. Graham, we thank you for joining us today and sharing your unique expertise with our audience. It has been a pleasure to speak with you. This is Pam Austin, bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you. Please join us next month for another great EDVIEW360 podcast.

Narrator:

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